For a culture occupied with ideas of success and virtue, and whether they were both necessary in tandem, education operated as a means of cultural transmission, writes Jennifer Lynn Peterson. With childhood increasingly recognized as a distinct stage of life and education in the later nineteenth century, school texts and children’s books were one way to suggest to children a certain sort of morality and social grounding.
Games were another. After all, in a game, things are clearly laid out. Adams and Edmonds note that
[i]n the world of a game, the player knows just what he is after. At the same time success is not seized quickly; rather it is to be pursued slowly and orderly within the structured context of clearly defined rules. A game, then, creates a small world in which success and the means to attain it are crystal clear.
The first American commercial board game is usually thought to be The Mansion of Happiness, invented by Anne Abbott of Salem, Massachusetts. A riff on the traditional “racing game” mode in which players compete to move pieces along a path first (e.g., Parcheesi, backgammon, the ancient Egyptian senet), Mansion had a simple premise: players spun a “teetotum”—a spinner with numbers or pips on it—and moved their pieces around the decorated board. (A spinner was preferable to dice, which were associated with gambling.)
Each space was marked with an outcome that either helped or hindered the player. Landing on “honesty” or “temperance” was clearly preferable to the sins of the “drunkard” or “audacity.” The goal was to arrive at the heavenly mansion of virtue, having made good life choices. The game hung on so tenaciously in players’ memories that Parker Brothers reissued it as a “retro” sort of offering in 1894.
The increasing popularity of board games in the nineteenth century wasn’t only a matter of bringing up children properly. A good game fit well with Victorian-era parlor culture and was inherently social. The commercial viability, spread, and popularity of games were also aided by advances in chromolithography, printing, and literacy.