After hunting for two years, collector Austin McConnell found a 1940s Monopoly set that gives us a hint of what wartime was really like.
Manufacturing Monopoly during WWII wasn’t easy, as materials were scarce and the cost to produce such a game was extremely high. In fact, the supply scarcity was the catalyst to John Waddington Ltd’s Monopoly War Time edition. Take a look at the quality of the game in this video – the game pieces (the hat, car, horse, etc) were cheap cardboard cutouts mounted on small crude wooden blocks, the dice were replaced with a cardboard spinner, and the real estate cards and money were printed on really cheap stock. The set came with an apology note for the game’s poor quality. I wouldn’t have thought a video about Monopoly could be that interesting, but McConnell’s presentation is fascinating.