Last week I played a great five-hour game of Monopoly with half a dozen relatives and friends. My wife sold me Boardwalk cheap so I could have a monopoly, but my brother sold better properties to his college-age daughter and she eventually wiped out everyone on the board.

We were not the only ones doing this. Something like 250 million copies of the game have been sold since Parker Brothers first popularized it in 1935. It now also comes in a Sponge Bob edition, an inflated "Here & Now Edition" in which the cheapest rent on the board is $20,000 ($2,500,000 with a hotel), 27 languages, and innumerable licensing spin-offs.

It's a gold mine for Hasbro, which bought Parker Brothers, yet it's nothing more than a box with pink and white and green play money, some cardboard deeds, a pair of dice, Chance and Community Chest cards and your favorite token -- race car, top hat, Scotty, thimble, or whatever.

Monopoly is a heck of a lot of fun to play, and there's an enjoyable new book about it, written by Philip E. Orbanes, titled Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way.

Orbane's book is full of well-researched stories you'll enjoy, but for my taste the author is way too enthusiastic about capitalism. Forget the politics, follow the game, and enjoy this book for what it is -- the best current history of an amazing, ongoing, cultural phenomenon.

Orbanes says, "I once asked a friend -- a game lover -- what he thought separated Monopoly from other modern classics like Scrabble, Pictionary, and Trivial Pursuit... 'It's the money,' he replied. 'All that Monopoly money.'"

Cousin Mo in Oregon recalls that "Bill Cosby once said something very profound about Monopoly. 'It's the only game that you play with fake money and real greed.' It still cracks me up because it is so true."

Earlier this week, Words on Books readers sent me their Monopoly stories.

Marilyn in Menlo Park: "My best story about Monopoly comes from my husband's family. His sister took all the pink money because that was her favorite color. I think those were the $5 bills. His family had to make 'fake' bills in order to continue to play the game."

In an email bordered with dollar signs, a friend writes, "When I first moved to L.A. I fell in with a rowdy group of social workers. On Friday nights we'd get stoned, order pizza... and finish off the evening with a game of Monopoly. With the addition of grass, people's REAL personalities came out in the cutthroat capitalism of the game."

Dixie in Mendocino: "My memories of Monopoly are mostly of being roundly and gleefully beaten by my three older brothers; watching my money taken away as I repeatedly landed on Park Place. When I DID win, the boys were sullen, so I pretty much gave up on aggressive game playing early. Later, as a parent, the word 'Monopoly' brings visions of toy closets filled with tumbled board games and that ubiquitous loose Monopoly money everywhere -- and straightening it all up, again and again."

Patty at Random House: "All of my cousins are entrepreneurs or business men, and every time we get together to play Monopoly, it's a four-hour affair. Business deals are being brokered on the side, railroad options are constantly negotiated ('I'll buy Pennsylvania RR off you for $400, and you don't have to pay when you land on it'), housing developments are going up on the blue properties ('If you let me front you the money for a hotel on your Park Place, then I get 20% of the income generated')."

Mickie in Albion: "I have one special memory of playing Monopoly as a young kid: We always 'upped the ante' so to speak. Made the $1 bills into $100's. That way, we had lots more cash for transactions. We dealt out the properties rather than having to buy them. Then we traded to make 'sets'.

"We had so much money that we could build unending hotels and houses on our properties! If we landed on Free Parking (which contained all the money from any fines or purchases) we got all that money as well. It was a fast, freewheeling game, not slow and boring. We were 8-10 years old at the time and must have played at least once a week!"

Monopoly's roots go back more than a hundred years. "The Landlord's Game" was created in 1903 to promote Henry George and the Single Tax. Later, similar games were hand copied by professors to teach economics.

Although there have been several books on how to play the game, and others on its history, the current Monopoly book by Philip Orbanes is by far the most complete and accurate.

And the stories are great, too.

Aired Sunday December 3, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday December 6, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way by Philip E. Orbanes. Da Capo Press hardcover $26. ISBN 0306814897.

Thanks to all who responded by email with your Monopoly stories (and suggestions for reading to Joselyn's class, too). To those who didn't get my request in time, or who may still have a Monopoly tale to tell, please don't hesitate to send it! Sincere apologies if your email didn't get quoted; I have very little space to spare in these four and a half minute scripts.

In an appendix Orbanes gives the web sites of a number of afficionados and game historians. You could start with the manufacturer's site: www.monopoly.com

The B&O Railroad is the most landed-upon space. The most landed-upon group is the Oranges. Boardwalk and Park Place, while the most expensive (lucrative) spots on the board, are not frequently landed upon, because a lot of people get sidetracked going to Jail and bypassing that row for a while. At least that's the statistical theory. But there's always luck, too.

One of the innovations of The Landlord's Game was the continuous circuit. 19th century board games typically started and finished somewhere rather than circling. By the way, "Go" in The Landlord's Game was named Mother Earth (later "Wages"). From the 1904 Patent: "Each time a player goes around the board he is supposed to have performed so much labor upon Mother Earth..."

The traditional property names are based on real locations in Atlantic City, NJ. Marvin Gardens was based on a suburb named Marven Gardens, which itself is a contraction of Margate and Ventnor, two neighboring towns. However, pre-Parker Brothers, Arctic Avenue was changed to Mediterranean Avenue because these friends "often played on cold winter nights and Mediterranean had a warmer association."

Charles Darrow (whose name appears under the face in Jail) did not invent Monopoly, but did create the well-known graphics, the property rectangles with colored bands at their tops. "By doing so, he added a look and feel to his board that would prove immensely appealing. Instinct drove him, as he would later explain, because the boards used by (friends) were so dull." (Orbanes).

During WWII Monopoly games were welcome in prisoner of war camps run by the Germans. It was believed the games would help pacify the captured soldiers. The British Secret Service arranged to insert not only silken "escape maps" into the boards, but also tools to cut barbed wire and real local money hidden under the play money. The Red Cross would deliver these Monopoly games into the camps, and they were not discovered. The placement of a period on the Patent line would indicate if the enclosed maps where for Spain, or northern Germany, or other locations. Amazing.

If your worthy cause wants to raise money with a Monopoly tournament, Hasbro may send you FREE sets of games that you can keep. Information here: http://hasbro.com/monopoly/default.cfm?page=tournaments_info