Readers Digest Australia Sampler 2022

first, Mansion of Happiness, came out in England in 1800. The ‘man- sion’ was heaven, and players raced to get there. Decades later, American board game magnate Milton Bradley reworked and rebranded it as ‘The Checkered Game of Life’. It was the only board game Bradley personally worked on. 3 Another popular racing game, Parcheesi, has roots in an- cient India, where it was called pachisi , from the Hindi word for 25, the highest possible outcome of a single throw. But whereas Americans only tweaked the name, the Brits de- cided to call it Ludo , Latin for ‘I play’. So when Englishman Anthony E. Pratt developed his murder-mystery board game in 1943, he called it Clue- do, playing on Ludo. 4 In international versions of Cluedo, the colourful cast can look quite different from what we’re used to. Professor Plum was originally called Dr Orange in Spain. Mr Green goes by Chef Lettuce in Chile. Mrs Peacock is Mrs Purple in Brazil and Mrs Periwinkle in France, and in Switzerland, she’s Captain Blue, a man. 5 Board games occasionally in- spire screenwriters. There’s the 1985 whodunit Clue , the 2000 fantasy film Dungeons & Dragons , and the 2012 action movie Battleship . Even the 2014 horror flick Ouija is technically based on a game, as the Ouija board was patented as a toy. Hasbro still sells it as a ‘family game’. 6 At least one board game is be- ing adapted into a television show, although its creator was a famous filmmaker. Albert Lam- orisse, who wrote and directed the 1956 Oscar-winner The Red Balloon , also created a board game he called La Conquête du Monde (Conquest of the World). Never heard of it? That’s because Parker Brothers bought the game and renamed it Risk. 7 Another game inventor, Alfred Butts, first called his creation Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words, before settling on Scrabble – a word that means ‘to hold on to something’. And that’s exactly what Butts did, as it took years for the game to gain trac- tion. Approximately 150 million sets have now been sold worldwide. 8 It was over a game of Scrabble that Chris Haney and Scott Abbott came up with the idea for their game, Trivial Pursuit. Its success launched a years-long le- gal battle from an encyclopaedist who claimed Haney took trivia from his books, something Haney read- ily admitted to doing. In the end, a US Federal Court decided you can’t steal trivia and dismissed the suit. During the 1980s, Trivial Pursuit readersdigest.com.au 23