The Mansion of Happiness - Legacy

Legacy

In spite of America's fascination with wealth and goods in the last decades of the 19th century, didactic Christian games held sway then and well into the twentieth. Even as late as 1893, for example, McLoughlin Brothers released The New Pilgrim's Progress, an upgrade of its 1875 publication based on John Bunyan's moralistic Christian classic, The Pilgrim's Progress. Similar to its predecessor, the new edition of the game saw players racing about a track from the City of Destruction to The Celestial City with way-stops at The Slough of Despair, Vanity Fair, and Beulah Land.

The affluence of the last decades of the 19th century generated America's first board games based on the idea that happiness and success were not incompatible with the accumulation of wealth through competitive, capitalistic behavior and culminated in 1935 with the publication of Monopoly, the most commercially successful board game in United States history.

Games with a Christian moral cast still hold a place on the American tabletop. Rainfall Educational Toys' Larry Burkett's Money Matters: The Christian Financial Concepts Game (1993) has players of seven years to adulthood moving about a board collecting income and paying off bills. The game's rule book states:

"Stewardship means taking care of our possessions, knowing that everything we have actually belongs to God. A key goal of this game is to teach that it is not how much money people have but their stewardship that is important. Players learn that (1) they can reach their financial goals by budgeting their money carefully and (2) it pays to be generous".