“Making friends and uniting communities one paper at a time.”

Good day gamers,

Wow! It took a lot of work, but I am going back to school and I just finished the first paper I’ve written in more than 25 years. I’m taking a class at Empire State College in Modern American History and I was allowed to write a paper on any topic I wanted to. Well, if you are not meeting me for the first time, you will know I can’t resist to talk about board games.

So, here is the report. I hope you enjoy.

If you have any comments, I’d love to hear them. Please email at Dave@GameMasterGames.com.

See you soon!

• Game Master Dave

(I noticed that the notes, bibliography, images, and quotes got all messed up when I cut and paste from Word)

Milton Bradley Spins the Spinner and Moves the Pieces

The Milton Bradley Company was founded by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1860, and the company produced a wide range of products during its 124-year history.  It was purchased by a toy and game manufacturer, Hasbro, in 1984.  Milton Bradley Company’s long history was successful because of the ideals of its founder, the diversification of products, advertising, and the ability to adjust to the shifts of American culture over time.

            “Even after the invention of the printing press, record players, cinema, radios,

            televisions, video games, and social media, we are still moving counters

            across boards and loving it.

            But board games have done more than just survive.

            They have made and ruined fortunes, revealed the secrets of lost civilizations

            and concealed the work of spies, and tested our morals.  They have saved

            marriages, exposed the inner workings of our minds, decoded geopolitics,

            tracked societal changes, and organized the killing of millions.

            And—most of all—they have entertained us.”¹

Ideals of the Founder

            There have been many books written about the history of Milton Bradley, the founder of the Milton Bradley Company.  All of them list his early childhood influences, his early businesses that failed, and how he started the board gaming company whose logo almost all of us have seen on the cover of a board game at some point in our lives.  However, finding primary source material for this report was not easy.  Milton Bradley kept a daily diary and the company kept records, but I could only find excerpts of these within other books, and they were not helpful for my thesis.  Rather than make a list of Milton Bradley’s accomplishments, I want to look at the man and see how his ideals led to the success of his company even after his retirement in 1907 and his death in 1911.

            Bradley grew up during the Victorian Era and later in his life the Progressive Era started. The ideals of these times were instilled within him for both his personal and business lives.² Bradley was born on November 8, 1836, in Vienna, Maine to his parents Fannie and Lewis Bradley.  During his childhood, Bradley listened to stories of his ancestors ‘adventures’ carving out a living in the wilderness areas of early Western Massachusetts where they encountered many dangers such as poor crops, weather, competing territorial claims, and other difficulties. Bradley learned from his parents that it was important to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors and to remain tenacious and keep improving his position.³ Bradley’s parents were involved in Bradley’s early childhood and believed that learning should be fun.  One famous story that everyone seems to retell is when young Bradley was learning arithmetic, his father had six bright red apples on the table.  He demonstrated when you remove two apples you can count how many apples remain.  This experience was fun for Bradley, and he never forgot it.  When Bradley had his own daughters, he would teach a similar lesson with brightly colored multiplication sticks manufactured by the Milton Bradley Company.⁴ Bradley’s parents felt it was important to feed the mind of children and talk things over, so that they learned.  They played games with young Bradley to include Chess and Checkers and they were believers that acquiring knowledge could both be fun, educational, and rewarding.⁵ Bradley never forgot these virtues and ideals.

            When Bradley was a young man, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were arriving in Massachusetts and many businesses were starting to take advantage of new technologies.  Bradley went to school for mechanical drafting, worked for a while, but the desire to start his own business grew within him.  He started a business in 1858 as a draftsman and patent solicitor and later moved into lithography.  His business struggled, but during this time, a childhood friend, George Tapley, sat with Bradley and taught him a game that Tapley had brought from Europe.  Before this game with Tapley, Bradley had learned about the struggles of his ancestors, had seen his father’s failed farming attempts and lost job opportunities, and experienced his own business difficulties.  “Milton Bradley’s life was filled with painful lessons about the cruelty of chance.”⁶ The game that Tapley showed Bradley had a playing piece that moved around the board to get to a final objective to win the game.  It was a race game.  The first player to reach the final space won the game.  Something awakened within Bradley.  He took the ideals of the Puritan upbringing and decided to make his own game using his current lithography business space to produce it.  The Checkered Game of Life and The Milton Bradley Company was born in 1860.

            Bradley printed a square board, eight spaces by eight spaces, that was like a Chess or Checkers board.  On it were red neutral spaces and white squares that had written on them human values or difficulties.  The objective was to score points by advancing the playing piece around the board and by using some strategy, to land only on the virtuous spaces like Bravery, Honor, Perseverance and Ambition.  Landing on these particular spaces advanced your pieces toward the end goal of the game which was Happy Old Age.  A player tried to avoid landing on spaces titled Gambling, Idleness, Ruin, Disgrace and even Suicide.⁷ In the Puritan communities, gambling was highly frowned upon.  Playing cards and dice throwing were considered gambling.  To sell his game to that community, Bradley had to take this into account and used a teetotum instead of dice.  The teetotum was a spinning top that had numbers printed on it.  As you spun the top with your fingertips, it would eventually stop and tilt over and a random number would be generated.  This is how you moved the playing piece around the board.  The game was designed to be fun, but also instill in both young and adults the benefits of the Puritan way of life.  As you raced around the board⁸ to strive, work hard, make correct choices, succeed, and avoid the pitfalls of life.

            Bradley printed his game in his warehouse and took some copies to New York City to sell them to small specialty shops.  Within a few days, he had sold them all.  In all of 1860 the Milton Bradley Company sold 40,000 copies of The Checkered Game of Life. The game was a big hit in New England since it exhorted moral values.⁹ This game would not have been what it was without Bradley’s upbringing in a moralistic climate, without his parent’s teaching him both strong values and ideals, and a sense of fun.  That Bradley was a mechanical drafter and lithographer certainly helped with production.  All these things seemed to fall into place at the same time, and Bradley took advantage of them.  He had landed on the Ambition and Success spaces.

            In 1869, after making many other games and products, which we will talk about in the next section, Bradley started to get interested in education and educational products.  Bradley never forgot about the bright red apples that his father used to help him learn arithmetic.  He never forgot that his mother instilled in him that learning should be fun.  When Bradley looked around at the current state of childhood education in New England, he noticed that teachers were making their own educational supplies for the classroom.  Since he owned a company that could produce products, including printing presses and skilled woodworkers, Bradley moved onto another idea.  He would invent, perfect, and produce educational supplies for the classrooms.  He worked hard at finding the right mix of ink to produce the primary colors needed for paper and wooden blocks.  He gave away samples to local schools so that they could experiment with them and give him feedback.  Bradley was deeply interested in changing the patterns of American education by developing the creative powers in children through play.¹⁰ He even wrote a manual for how teachers could use his products in the classroom.¹¹ Bradley felt that too many teachers were choosing to teach ‘classical’ education over ‘scientific’.  He even encouraged his most skilled laborers to teach their craft to young boys and men.  These classes were later picked up by the city school board, and some of Bradley’s employees were hired as the first instructors in those schools.¹² “…learning should be fun…but it should be learning—and not just fun. Otherwise, how did one acquire the necessary discipline with which to face life?”¹³ The company sales grew with these educational products.  Bradley started out as a wage worker and understood the importance of hard work and dedication to an idea and an ideal.  His commitment to early education in America helped the founding of organized kindergarten and elementary classes.  Though kindergarten was not Bradley’s idea, he helped it flourish by providing educational products and supplies to make it successful while at the same time continuing the success of his own company.  Bradley’s father’s red apples went a long way to feed American youth.

“By the end of the nineteenth century, schools were no longer dots on the landscape of education or childhood. They had become shelters, formidable structures of persuasions through which every child passed on the road to adulthood. Not total institutions like families…schools became mediating structures: way stations between the small world of family, church and neighborhood, and the large world of government, nation, and marketplace.”¹⁴

Diversification of Products

            How does one make a successful company?  Writing a paper on this topic would take hundreds of years.  There are thousands of business self-help books on the market today.  We have already seen that having the ambition, ideas, and ideals of a good founder for the company can certainly be a good start, but many excellent entrepreneurs have still failed due to various circumstances.  We have all probably heard from our parents or from commercials during our younger days that if we want to invest in the stock market, we should diversify our investments.  The Milton Bradley Company thought the same thing.  The company was first founded on mechanical drafting but moved to lithography when the technology developed for that.  Once it found lithography business challenging, it moved into producing games.  Due to the ideals of Bradley, the company then got involved in educational products.  We shall soon see that the company was flexible and open to experiment, investment, and advertisement of multiple types of entertainment and practical product lines.  The company wanted to stay in business, and it felt it must continue to offer new and creative games and products as people needed a diversion from their own hardships of the day.¹⁵

            Soon after the sales success of The Checkered Game of Life in 1861, the American Civil War started.  Bradley saw stationed Union soldiers in encampments around Springfield, Massachusetts.  These soldiers seemed bored during their downtime.  Bradley immediately thought of an idea that could help the soldiers and help his company at the same time.  He designed and made the first travel set of games.  This set included traditionally classic games like Chess, Checkers, Backgammon and Dominoes.  It included a folding board and an area to keep the pieces and of course, The Checkered Game of Life.¹⁶ Bradley initially gave away copies for free and soon the company received thousands of orders from soldiers and from citizens that wanted a copy of the game for their family soldier.¹⁷ Bradley also ended up using his mechanical drafting skills to help the war effort via contract to technically draft new guns for the Union Army.  Springfield Armory was even located in his home city.  Though Bradley had passed away by the time World War I occurred, the Milton Bradley Company, once again, made travel games for American soldiers to take to Europe.¹⁸ And when World War II broke out, not only were travel games made once again, but to help the war effort, his woodworkers made gun stocks, and his metalworkers made universal ball joints for landing gear on American war planes.¹⁹ One interesting anecdote from World War II is that the famed Admiral Halsey from the Pacific Theater put in an order for 35,000 travel games to be produced in less than two weeks for the American soldiers fighting against Japan. Halsey even stated that if the company couldn’t handle that kind of volume to let him know and he would send Navy personnel to his warehouse to help finish the job.²⁰ Bradley was able to finish the contract with its employees working day and night.  No other gaming or toy company took advantage of this travel game market during these American conflicts.

            The Milton Bradley Company made many products for the first time, including some original games for entertainment, some remakes, and some improvements on older games. The company also moved into the toy market.  Toy guns became popular during and after the wars and their best seller was the Buffalo Bill gun.  Paper dolls were high sellers during the wartime periods as well.  An older version of Golf was imported by early Dutch settlers, and this morphed into Croquet.²¹ Croquet became a very popular leisure time activity and was even advertised as a social event as well as good exercise.  The one problem with a game of Croquet was that no one could agree on what the official rules were.  The Milton Bradley Company not only produced a Croquet (1867) set with brightly colored balls and mallets, but also included basic rules, so that everyone would understand the game better.  This was a huge seller.  The game was originally designed for adults and had adult sized mallets, but after complaints by parents of children, the company made a children sized set and sold many copies.  They even produced a travel size set for the family to take on vacation.²² The company produced Rebus card sets, a deck of cards with symbolic pictures that represented popular words or phrases, with expansions to be released every so often.  Sunday School flash cards were also printed and became popular.  During the late nineteenth century, games played in the house became so popular that a whole genre of games were developed called ‘Parlor Games’.    People could entertain company in the evening after working all day.  Bradley entertained on a regular basis in his house and tried out new games and forms of entertainment he was working on.  He produced the Myriopticon (1866), a visual story telling game, and the Zoetrope, a device that produced the illusion of motion from a set of pictures (1866).  Zoetrope sales continued for more than 40 years.  Bradley took the idea of a little frustrating hand puzzle from Europe and perfected it and called it ‘The Mystic Fifteen Puzzle” (1867).    For his educational materials, the company produced fingerpaint, watercolor paints, crayons, colored paper, arithmetic flash cards, rulers, compasses, drawing boards, language tablets, “Bradley’s Word Builders Game”, ‘Bradley’s Sentence Builders Game”, stencils, multiplication sticks, play paper money and coins, easels, large heavy duty paper cutters that we have all used or seen in our arts and craft classes or stores, and more.  Bradley even got into jigsaw puzzles.  His workshop not only had the printing machinery available for these puzzles, but also had machines to help cut the cardboard.²³ He also printed some educational books.  My mother, Dorothy VanderWerf, as an elementary teacher in the 1950s remembers using Milton Bradley crayons and seeing catalogs from the Milton Bradley Company in the classroom.  In 1876, Bradley was one of the nation’s top toy and game manufacturers and was even given a Medal of Excellence award at the Centennial Exposition, “which was the first award ever made for ethical teaching of children through play.”24

            Moving into the twentieth century, the Milton Bradly Company continued its extensive line of game products, but still produced toys that were also game-like.  Twister is one of their well-known properties.  Battleship, Connect Four, Chutes and Ladders (loosely based on The Checkered Game of Life) and Candy Land are other famous titles.  In 1970, they even tried their hand at electronic and video games, becoming the first company to produce a hand-held electronic game.²⁵ In 1922, the company started making Mah Jongg sets.  Mah Jongg had taken the United States by storm, but it was not invented by Milton Bradley.  However, the company not only produced sets but formed the first Mah Jongg League.²⁶ In 1927, when Charles Lindberg flew across the Atlantic Ocean, the Milton Bradley Company came out with a game titled “Flight to Paris” taking advantage of the craze of this accomplishment.²⁷ During the Depression, the company adapted and made cheaper quality games so that people could still afford them.²⁸ People sought escape through games and puzzles, so the company was able to survive through economic downturn, but it did need to adjust its internal structure and the number of product lines it produced.  To get through the roughest economic patch, the company even sold its large collection of old, used lithographic stones as garden decorations.²⁹ The Milton Bradley Company was the first to mass produce board games, which thus made them cheaper to manufacture and therefore more affordable.³⁰ In 1950, the first game to be based on a television show, “Hopalong Cassidy”, was made by the company.  In 1960, a one hundred anniversary edition of The Game of Life was produced with updated packaging, colored pieces and play money.  It shared little resemblance to the original The Checkered Game of Life except that your playing pieces started out on a beginning space with little to no resources and the objective was to be the first to retire comfortably.³¹ Interestingly, this version of the game still had no dice included with the game, but used a spinning wheel embedded in the game board for randomization to move the pieces.  In potential homage to the educational ideals of the company’s founder, Milton Bradley, the updated version of the game included the options to purchase insurance and stocks, both of which one can expect children to have no real-life experience with.  Was this included to teach the young about future decisions and life choices that they would have to make?  An educator may think so.³² Over time, more than twenty commercialized, licensed versions of The Game of Life were modified in ways based on some of the biggest hits in modern culture, such as The Simpsons, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and SpongeBob SquarePants.  The Milton Bradley Company continued to innovate and diversify its product lines to reach the demand of the American population and to instill a sense of play while they learn.

Advertising.

            In the late nineteenth century, due to industrialization, urbanization, and unions, the middle class started to grow in America.  Americans had more leisure time due to the changes in the work week and had more expendable income.³³ How do you reach these new leisure seekers?  Newspapers during this time had advertising embedded in the pages, and this was the way that companies started promoting their wares and services.  The Milton Bradley Company advertised in newspapers, but they also ‘took a page’ from the Sears & Roebuck popular catalog (1888) of the day and produced their own merchandise catalog.  The catalog they produced not only included games, but also had a section for educational materials and it was widely distributed to teachers across the nation, many of whom were also parents.  According to an article in the Journal of Education in 1893, “Every teacher should have upon her desk the illustrated catalogues of Milton Bradley & Co., Springfield…and should look them through frequently to see for how little money she can obtain all that she must have for her best work.”³⁴ 

            The Milton Bradley Company made sure its products were superior to those produced by other companies.  Bradley agonized over choices in color, method of play, instructions, packaging, and artwork.  Later in the company history, the logo was a simple red and blue capitalized ‘MB’, but a golden key was added to the logo for its educational lines as an emphasis of the importance of the products.  The company’s slogan in 1960 was even “Another Key to Fun and Learning”.³⁵ 

            Before the invention of the television, playing board games in the home had a lot of competition.  The proliferation of the automobile made families mobile.  Families started to travel on vacations, to go out to the movies, to shop, to head to the local eatery or bowling alley.  Business slowed somewhat, but due to Milton Bradley’s diversification, they were able to weather this downward trend.  When the television hit American homes the Milton Bradley Company immediately started to advertise on TV.  The company noticed that as Americans spent more time at home around the TV set, they were more inclined to spend family time together and therefore desired forms of entertainment based on some of the TV shows they were watching.  As noted earlier, a game based on the TV show “Hopalong Cassidy” was a large hit for the company, but they also advertised and licensed the Howdy Doody Game, Concentration, and others.  Most games sold in Europe and the United States were sold in the months leading up to the Christmas holiday, but Milton Bradley kept up the advertising and new product releases all year long.³⁶ By 1985 the top ten selling toys in America were based on cartoons that were seen on the TV.³⁷ By the late 1980’s game advertising of all game companies approached almost one billion dollars.³⁸ Parents wanted the best for their kids, so they purchased the newest trend or fad promoted by advertising.  This helped drive the growth of the United States toy industry into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse by 1970.³⁹ Even the library system has recently taken notice of the popularity of games.  The American Library Association, with a grant from the Verizon Foundation, has started to research and look at buying games for circulation and running events within its walls.⁴⁰ My wife, Ginger, and I run gaming events at our local library, and it appears the trend is building. The Milton Bradley Company, throughout its history, has taken advantage of advertising to promote games in a timely manner as demand warrants.  This is a reminder that its founder, Milton Bradley, was flexible in providing games based on the need at the time.

Adjusting to the Shifts in American Culture

“Board games take inspiration from real life.”⁴¹

            “Over time, society’s attitude toward leisure activities changed.”⁴²

“After all is said and done, Parker once said, games help the world along.”⁴³

“Games are an essential aspect of cultural activity, comparable in some ways to the performing arts.”⁴⁴

The name of Milton Bradley has become a part of American culture.  So has Parker Brothers, Nintendo, Disney, and many others.  But Milton Bradley, in relation to gaming companies, has survived because it could adapt to changes in American culture.  It took advantage of the fundamental changes that people experience in their daily lives.  It became a part of the change, joining with the masses as they experienced new technologies, new challenges, and new experiences.  As America changed, so did the Milton Bradley Company.  A good comparison to look at would be the differences between The Checkered Game of Life and the 1960 100 Anniversary edition of The Game of Life.  The original game’s goal was to achieve happiness, while the 1960 version of the game, reflecting American society of the time, was more materialistic and competitive.⁴⁵

            Games have been around for more than 3,000 years.  The Egyptian game of Senet, in various forms, have been discovered in multiple tombs.⁴⁶ But what does a game tell you about the people of the time?  You may only be able to figure this out if you had a printed copy of the rules.  Sadly, with Senet, we are not sure what the basic rules or objective of the game is.  But is understanding games of the past important?  David Parlett, an internationally renowned researcher of games seems to think so, as he quotes Michael Dummett from The Game of Tarot (London, 1980):

“A game may be as integral to a culture, as true an object of human aesthetic appreciation, as admirable a product of creativity as a folk art or a style of music; and, as such, it is quite as worthy of study.”⁴⁷

If someone were to study games in the modern era, could they look to the Milton Bradley Company to study American culture of the time?  I think they could.  I think that the games that were produced by the company reflect the culture of the time.

Milton Bradley’s first game, The Checkered Game of Life, as we have already explored, came out of Bradley’s childhood reflection of what life should be like.  A player in the board game, as in real life, should strive towards success.  This was a sign of the times, the religious and societal norms of the day.  One must stay away from failure and poor choices.

The arrival of the industrial revolution an increase in the time for leisure activities.  Industrialization led to technology, which led to machines doing more of the dangerous and labor-intensive work, which led to unions forming to protect the workers, which led to higher wages and fewer hours of work, which led to the growth of the middle class, which led to the search of leisure time activities to move from a life filled with dull chores to a life that included entertainment, fulfillment, enjoyment, and play.  The growth of the middle class is reflected in the job titles recorded in the 1860 census as ‘Professional Service’ and ‘Commercial Position’.  These job titles accounted for about 250,000 people in 1860 and dramatically increased to 4,000,000 in 1910.⁴⁸ 

In addition to the rise of technology and the growth of the middle class, there were two other changes in American culture that facilitated filling leisure time and thus the sale of games.  The first one was the change in social attitudes towards play and especially for the children.  Americans started to feel it was important for children to have toys and games to play and experiment with.  And the second was the formal recognition of the Christmas holiday in 1870.⁴⁹ Both of these helped drive the entertainment industry along.  Milton Bradley took advantage of every change in society and culture to promote and continue his business.  They also identified that there is a commodity in selling toys and games that never goes away and that commodity is children.  If society exists there will always be children ready to learn and play and the company felt they would try and help them along, the best they could.⁵⁰ In order to keep on track with changes in society and culture, the company started a research and development department in the 1940s.⁵¹

Even games not made by the Milton Bradley Company, like Scrabble, have become a part of cultural identity since games are featured in shows, movies, TV programs, literature, and magazines.⁵²

We have already explored how the Milton Bradley Company shifted gears during three American wars to produce travel games for the soldiers and to fulfill government contracts to produce goods for the American military.  We have also explored how the Milton Bradley Company adjusted to the introduction of the television by coming out with products that emulate the popular programming of the time.  Toy and game manufacturing is a serious business and is an important part of our society and culture.⁵³ But what about more modern changes to this industry?

In 1984, The Milton Bradley Company was purchased by Hasbro, another toy and game manufacturing company.  Games have not declined in popularity.  As a matter of fact, they have increased in demand in the United States, and the styles of games are changing.  Due to globalization of the game market, some titles from European nations, especially Germany, are changing the way Americans experience gaming.  The culture of these ‘Eurogames’ is slightly different than that of American games.  The Eurogames are less conflict oriented, more social, potentially even cooperative, and have some sort of narrative to tell,⁵⁴ while many American games remain more confrontational with a single winner dominating other players.  But American manufacturers, like Hasbro, have taken notice as they have lost some market share in the industry, and they are once again adjusting their product lines as Americans adjust to living in a commercial, communicative, global economy and ever-changing culture.  Board games are having a huge resurgence in the last twenty years as people move away from screens and desire human connection.⁵⁵ However, these changes are outside the scope of this paper.

Conclusion

            Though Milton Bradley retired from the company in 1907 and passed away in 1911, the legacy that he left for his company to produce products that were educational, and fun, lived on until the end of the company in 1984.  Over its 124-year history, the company produced thousands of products.  Even though no one plays The Checkered Game of Life anymore or remembers that Bradley helped the early kindergarten classes become better supplied with educational materials, his legacy lives on in some of the games that are still played today, even if they are produced under a different manufacturer’s label.  His company was successful.  Our society was better entertained and educated because of this man.  Our culture was supported and even revised by his games.  Because he took a chance and spun the teetotum on whether to start a business or not, we all advanced down the game board towards our goals as seekers of fun and learning.

“On the other hand, there is the general recognition that play provides both

mental stimulation and an element of enjoyment, both of which are essential

to a person’s well-being.  The warning of the ant and the grasshopper story

is coupled with an opposite proverb, “All work and no play make Jack a

dull boy.” The Russian author Leo Tolstoy considered play to be at the

heart of existence.  “If games were nonsense, what else would there be

left to do?” he mused.”⁵⁶

“The history of games tells a story about the history of ideas, about life

and death, about the questions people have asked and the answers they

have come up with over the centuries.”⁵⁷

“If you want to improve the moral character of a society, you do not necessarily have to change the way people think and feel.  Sometimes, all you have to do is fiddle with the rules that govern what happens every time they pass Go.”⁵⁸

Notes

1. Tristan Donavan, It’s All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to

Settlers of Catan (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 7.

2. Jennifer Lee Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to

Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2005), xi

• James J. Shea and Charles Mercer, It’s All in the Game: A Biography of Milton Bradley,

the Man who taught America to Play (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), 24.

• Ibid., 132.
• Ibid., 28-29.
• Joan Moriarity and Jonathan Kay, Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life

(Toronto, ON: Sutherland House, 2019), 20.

• Linda Skeers, Toy Makers (New York, NY: Thomson Gale, 2004), 15.
• David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999), 34.

• Nathan Aaseng, Business Builders in Toys and Games (Minneapolis, MN: The Oliver

Press, Inc., 2003), 31.

1. Ibid., 135.
2. Ibid., 137.
3. Ibid., 139.
4. Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and

Art Education in the Context of His Time.”, 25.

1. Skeers, Toy Makers, 19.

1. Ibid., 70.
2. Ibid., 200.
3. Ibid., 235.
4. Ibid., 240.
5. Ibid., 60.
6. Ibid., 94.
7. Anderson, Who Was Milton Bradley?, 91.
8. Aaseng, Business Builders in Toys and Games, 35.
9. Anderson, Who Was Milton Bradley?, 98.
10. Shea, It’s All in the Game, 104.
11. Ibid., 207.
12. Ibid., 208.
13. Ibid., 235.
14. Aaseng, Business Builders in Toys and Games, 36.
15. Jill Lepore, “The Meaning of Life”, Harvard Thinks Big Lecture Series, 2012.
16. Donavan, It’s All a Game, 61.
17. Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and

Art Education in the Context of His Time”, 20.

• Alfred Winship, “What to Teach, When to Teach It, and How, “ The Journal of

Education, 37, no. 1 (January 1893): 4.

• Shea, It’s All in the Game, 277.
• Ibid., 97.

• Ibid., 17.
• Philip E. Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks

 to Trivial Pursuit (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 129.

• Brian Mayer and Christopher Harris, Libraries Got Game: Aligned Learning through

Modern Board Games (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2010), 1.

• Moriarity, Your Move, 70.
• Skeers, Toy Makers, 8.
• Orbanes, The Game Makers, Inside Cover.
• Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games, x.
• Shea, It’s All in the Game, 279.
• Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games, 63.
• Ibid., x.
• Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and

Art Education in the Context of His Time”, 21.

• Aaseng, Business Builders in Toys and Games, 12-14.
• Shea, It’s All in the Game, 281.
• Ibid., 263.
• Philip Michaels, “Games Maker Milton Bradley.” Los Angeles, CA: Investor’s Business
• Daily (January 1999)

• Skeers, Toy Makers, 10.
• Emma Kennedy, “The Boardgame Renaissance: Will the Boom Last?” Sunday Business

Post, Dec 17, 2016.

• Skeers, Toy Makers, 8.
• Jill Lepore, “The Meaning of Life”, Harvard Thinks Big Lecture Series, 2012.
• Moriarity, Your Move, 71.

Bibliography

Aaseng, Nathan. Business Builders in Toys and Games. Minneapolis, MN: The Oliver Press,

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Anderson, Kirsten, Who Was Milton Bradley?. New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlop, 2016.

Chang, Clio. 2016. “Continental Divide.” New Republic 247 (6): 17.

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Donavan, Tristan. It’s All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of

Catan. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Kennedy, Emma. “The Boardgame Renaissance: Will the Boom Last?” Sunday Business

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The Checkered Game of Life

Checkered Game of Life

Board Game Geek Information on The Checkered Game of Life

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40244/checkered-game-life

Teetotum

Checkered Game of Life

The Game of Life, 1960 version

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2921/game-of-life

https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Milton_Bradley

  Logo 1997-Present

https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Milton_Bradley