The Great American Gameboard: From the Early Republic to the Gilded Age--A History in Nine Popular Board Games

The Great American Gameboard invites readers into the parlor rooms and gathering spaces of early Americans that have gone all but unexamined in commercial histories

Board games are sweeping a techno-tired America. Scheduled events in bars, restaurants, and clubs that feature board games as a centerpiece sell out as soon as they’re announced. In The Great American Gameboard, Matthew Sivils, crafts a captivating and unlikely story of America through the lens of eight seminal board games that weaves together the hopes and dreams of an aspiring nation into a book that connects our past to our present.

In The Great American Gameboard, eight 19th-century board games catapult us from the days of the Early Republic, through the Civil War, and into the momentous and disturbing final decades of the century. Stories of unknown, misunderstood, or underappreciated figures jump from the game boards.

From The Game of Pope and Pagan (1844), that invited players to consider America’s protestant revival to The Game of Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853), which showed players how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin swayed the American public’s opinion about slavery to The Game of Round the World with Nellie Bly (1890), where players stepped aboard a steamer to Europe to join Nellie Bly on her race around the world as she challenged the late 19th century landscape of women’s rights, Sivlis creates an American board game bonanza.

Keeping the best for last, Sivils shines a light on Elizabeth Magie’s controversial Landlord’s Game (1906), a game that challenged the excesses of the Gilded Age and tells the story of how her design was eventually stolen to create the most popular board game in the world – Monopoly.

If you’ve ever played Operation or Battleship or The Game of Life or any other of a zillion classic American board games, you will love Matthew Sivils’s wonderful book. So, spin the wheel...