He remembers visiting the plant and being shown copies of the Anti-Monopoly game. Glen Taylor, a longtime Mankato businessman and owner of the Star Tribune, said he did regular business with Mankato Corporation in the '70s. 'I think he came to us looking for a manufacturer,' Rottunda said. John Rottunda, who became company president in 1977 after Foster shifted to the board chairman role, recalled that a Wayzata-based sales rep for the game industry made the initial connection between Anspach and Foster. Russ Foster, left, posed with Mankato Corporation workers assembling Anti-Monopoly's sequel, Anti-Monopoly II, in 1983. It was complete with play money, 'mailbox cards' and 'indictment chips.' Like Monopoly, Anti-Monopoly is a square board with spaces around the edges representing conglomerates - oil and gas companies, steel and tire makers, utilities and railroads. Anspach was struck by a realization: 'He could create an anti-monopoly game of his own.' With help from his family, he set out developing a game that rewarded breaking up monopolies, not building them. 'The board game rewarded something in play that hurt people in reality,' Anspach thought, according to Pilon's account. But with an oil crisis developing and consumer suffering on the rise, the game's message seemed less fun. Later, in Berkeley in the early 1970s, he played with his wife and sons. Anspach was a German Jew who had immigrated to New York with his family in 1938, according to Mary Pilon's 2015 history of Monopoly, ' The Monopolists.'Īnspach played Monopoly in Czechoslovakia as a child, Pilon wrote. The Anti-MonopolistĪnti-Monopoly was the creation of Ralph Anspach, who in 1973 was teaching economics at San Francisco State University. He sought answers from Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune's reader-powered community reporting project. 'I thought I knew this town well, so I wondered where that could be.' 'We thought, 'God dang, they destroyed all those games in Mankato?'' Trieschman said. The retired firefighter and lifelong Mankato resident wanted to know the location of the burial site, and who manufactured the games.

Reader Mike Trieschman learned of the Anti-Monopoly graveyard in a recent PBS documentary about Monopoly's history. The saga remains a prominent chapter in the history of Monopoly, the most popular modern board game. Parker Brothers, then a division of Golden Valley-based General Mills, obtained a federal court order to have the game buried.

Then, much like in Monopoly, the ownership class quashed the competition.

Manufactured in Mankato, the game Anti-Monopoly found success in the mid-1970s amid America's rampant inflation and institutional distrust. Somewhere beneath southern Minnesota lie the remnants of about 40,000 board games once created and sold as an antiestablishment alternative to mega-selling Monopoly. Listen and subscribe to our podcast: Via Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher

Monopoly board game origins