When I look back at the board games I played in my childhood, Monopoly stands out. Compared to games like Mouse Trap, Scattergories, and even Scrabble, Monopoly is much more complicated, takes longer, and requires more thinking (at least in terms of math and strategy). European board games are often similarly complicated, but in the US, family games tend to be simple and fast. So how did Monopoly get to be such a popular game?

The title of Philip Orbanes' Monopoly: the World's Most Famous Game—and how it got that way indicated that it would hold the answer. And there's definitely a lot of interesting material there, especially about the early days of the game. Unfortunately, most of the history of Monopoly had to be pieced together from patent filings, court cases, and the memories of early Parker Brothers' employees, so there's a lot of detail missing.

Apart from the actual history, I hoped to gain some insight into the impact of the design changes that occurred between the invention of The Landlord's Game in 1906 and the recognizable version of Monopoly in 1933. Unfortunately, although Orbanes is a game designer, the only mention of design issues tends to be in short paragraphs that give conclusions (like that Monopoly isn't dependent on luck) with little rationale.

Orbanes does best when he discusses the time period that he is personally familiar with, the period when he was in charge of Monopoly at Parker Brothers in the 80s and 90s. This section contains a lot of non-Monopoly detail as Orbanes tries to tie Monopoly to capitalism's success over communism in the same time period.

Although the history is worth reading, you can find as much detail organized better in the Wikipedia article. The only answer Orbanes gives to the titular question of how Monopoly became so popular is that it spent so much time being tweaked by so many people. This is probably true, which just reinforces the importance of polish and testing when designing a game.