“The earliest ever version of the board game Monopoly has sold for a whopping $123,000. The set was one of 5,000 made in 1933 by Charles Darrow, the purported inventor of Monopoly, and is the only one to have survived to this day. The dog-eared set is made out of a piece of oilcloth and is in the form of the original circular shape that is 33 inches in diameter. Heating engineer Darrow drew and coloured in the playing surface using pen and ink and made the little hotels and houses from strips of pine wood moulding. He also devised and wrote the rules of the game – a carbon typescript of which was included in the auctioned set. Despite its round shape, the design and format is almost identical to the 275 million Monopoly games that have subsequently sold around the globe. It has 28 properties, including four train stations and two utility companies, three chance and three community chest spaces, two tax squares, and spaces for go, free parking, jail and the dreaded ‘go to jail’. There is no value on the spaces but they are colour-coded just like today. The original game is based on the streets of Atlantic City, U.S., but it proved so popular that the London version was produced just two years later.” w/ photos
