Board games trivia
You know how to play your favorite board games. What you may not know is the unusual backstory behind your all-time favorites.
Time for some board game trivia.
We’ll start with Monopoly because for decades it’s monopolized households worldwide. What you may not know is how the game was used to help British prisoners escape the Nazis during World War II, or that the chances of winning a game in 20 seconds are one in 254 trillion. We can’t fathom that in 1988, a San Francisco jeweler spent $2 million making a Monopoly board out of gold with diamond-encrusted dice, and hotels and houses embellished with rubies and sapphires.
Is Yahtzee on your top ten list? It was invented by a wealthy Canadian couple who introduced the game to their friends while aboard their yacht. When the rights were sold to a toy maker, the so-called “yacht game” was renamed Yahtzee.
While Jenga is not officially a board game, its trivia is worth mentioning. Played with 54 wooden blocks stacked into a tower, players take turns carefully removing a block until it topples over. Games don’t take long unless you’re playing with eight-foot solid pine blocks weighing 600 pounds each and move them with Caterpillar construction vehicles. In 2015, that game lasted 28 hours until the fourteenth round. Imagine that!