Roll the Dice on Our Family Game Night Quiz

Lizzie Magie obtained a patent in 1904 for The Landlord’s Game, a real estate–focused board game whose gridded playing space will look familiar to Monopoly fans everywhere. Charles Darrow was introduced to the game via a Quaker community in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that had adapted a version of Magie’s game to include local landmarks like Boardwalk and Mediterranean and Baltic avenues. In 1935, he sold his version to Parker Brothers — which quietly bought up Magie’s patent and credited Darrow as the game’s inventor.

A year before he created a board game about world domination (which he first called The Conquest of the World), French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for The Red Balloon, a 34-minute film about a boy who rescues a red balloon with a mind of its own.

Retired teacher Eleanor Abbott created Candy Land in 1948 while recovering in a San Diego hospital’s polio wing. She made the game, with tokens that resemble gingerbread men, as a distraction for other patients.

Clue was adapted into a 1985 comedy that bombed at the box office but became a cult hit on home video, especially for its multiple endings. Battleship inspired a widely panned action thriller that snagged costar Rihanna a Razzie Award. And Dungeons & Dragons has inspired two films, a 2000 fantasy starring Jeremy Irons as an evil mage and a lighter 2023 comedic action movie with Chris Pine leading a band of questing adventurers.

Charades is a centuries-old parlor game that has popped up in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and even boosted careers. In the 1990s, Arsene Wegner won the job as manager of North London’s famed Arsenal soccer team after dazzling the squad’s vice chairman at a dinner party by acting out A Midsummer Night’s Dream.