Milton Bradley

Milton Bradley was born in 1836, in Vienna, Maine, to Lewis and Fannie Lyford Bradley. Lewis Bradley could trace his ancestry back to a Daniel Bradley, who landed in Salem, Massachusetts in 1636 -- not the Mayflower, perhaps, but solid and long-established New England stock. Milton's early years were hardscrabble: until he was 11, his family moved about New England frequently, his father taking whatever odd jobs he could find. In 1847, a bit more stability was achieved, when his father settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, taking a job at a local cotton mill; in the early 19th century, the industrial heartland of the United States stretched across central Massachusetts and Connecticut, and into New York's Hudson Valley.

Bradley attended Lowell Grammar School, and then Lowell High School; at both schools, his best friend was George Tapley, who later became his business partner, and whose son, William, ultimately succeeded Bradley as president of the Milton Bradley Company.

Though he attended the Lowell Scientific School for a short period, his parents moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and he moved with them, unable to meet the tuition expenses alone. Not finding work in Hartford himself, he left for Springfield, Massachusetts, where he quickly found work as a draftsman for the Wason Car-Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of train cars and locomotives. In 1858, a business panic led Wason to close its doors, and Bradley found himself out of work; he opened up shop, at age 22, as a mechanical draftsman and patent solicitor, but found little business. In 1860, the Wason Company unexpectedly received a huge order from Said Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, for custom train cars, including a palatial personal car; Wason commissioned Bradley to draft its design, his first large order as a draftsmen.

In appreciation, the company had a lithograph printed of Bradley's design, and presented him with a copy. Intrigued by the lithographic production process, Bradley purchased a used lithograph machine from a printer in Providence, Rhode Island, and began to print lithographs, initially mainly of mechanical drawings for local businesses. As the only lithographer in Massachusetts outside Boston, his business thrived.

According to the company's official history (itself based on Bradley's diary), the same year, Bradley was invited to his friend Tapley's house to play a game one evening. What game Bradley and Tapley played is unknown, though it is identified as English in origin, and Shea says it was "played on a board with oval discs" -- it's not clear whether he means that the board itself was printed with spaces in the shape of ovals, or whether he is referring to teetotums. (Teetotums were polygonal pieces of wood, cardboard, or paper, printed with a number on each side, through the middle of which a spindle was stuck; you spun the teetotum, and the number of the side on which it came to rest was your die-roll, in essence. Common to many English and American boardgames of the period, their purpose was to avoid the prejudice against dice then current among the devout.)

In 1860, a number of American printers, including W. & S.B. Ives, were already producing boardgames for the American market, but that market was small, and not anywhere near as developed as the British boardgame market of the time. Shea's story does not refer to pre-existing American competitors, but it is by no means unlikely that Bradley was aware that others were beginning to produce boardgames at the time. According to the official story, however, Bradley's game with Tapley inspired him to create a game of his own.

That game was The Checkered Game of Life, published in 1860 (link is to a photo of the board). The game contained a six-sided teetotum (not, as stated in some other sources, a spinner); the first player to accumulate 100 points wins. Movement is Checkers-like, that is, half the squares of the grid are impassable and you move diagonally; you must move as many squares as the number generated by the teetotum (I do not know at present whether changing direction is permitted, but will try to find out). When you land on a square printed with a hand icon, you move directly to some other square, as indicted by the text in that square, with the hand providing a helpful pointer in the general direction of the target square. If forced to Suicide, you lose; and it would be difficult, though not impossible, to win without achieving a Happy Old Age.

The current Game of Life published by Hasbro's Milton Bradley division is said to be "inspired" by Bradley's original design, and indeed, corporate executives commissioned it from Reuben Klamer in 1960 as a centennial celebration, but apart from the fact that both are technically race games, there is little resemblance between the two. In particular, the ethos of the two are miles apart; in common with many other games for its period, such as Ives's The Reward of Virtue and Anne Abbot's Mansion of Happiness, Bradley's game seeks to morally improve its players even while entertaining them. Klamer's game is a crass celebration of American materialism and its promise of "the good life." Commenters on Bradley's earlier game often draw the contrast between the two games as indicative of American social change, which may be true.

But we, of course, are concerned with the art of design, rather than with social history; from our perspective, more interesting is the contrast in gameplay between the two. Bradley's game is a simple, luck-based race game, with mild borrowings from Snakes and Ladders (the changes in square imparted by the hands); Klamer's game is equally luck based, and also a race game, but with a greater variety of encounter and, in the "children" you accumulate during play and the strong importance it places on a college education, more depth to play. Klamer's game is not strategically sophisticated -- and yet, clearly, over a hundred years, the audience even for children's boardgames had grown somewhat in sophistication; unquestionably, Bradley's game would not be successful today, nor would it have been in 1960, except perhaps as an historical curiosity.

The Checkered Game of Life was modestly successful for Bradley, but with the coming of the Civil War, his business turned to producing design sketches for the armaments manufacturers of the region. In 1861, however, Bradley produced Games for the Soldiers, the first known instance of a "travel edition" -- a small and portable kit containing miniature versions of Chess, Checkers and other classic games -- and also of The Checkered Game of Life. Although intended primarily for military use, Bradley also distributed copies of the product to Northeastern retailers.

His next product was essentially a set of rebuses in the form of cards printed with colored pictures, marketed as Modern Heiroglyphics, which went through three editions. Following that was Patriot Heroes, or Who's The Traitor?, an Authors-like card game with cards representing generals from both sides of the Civil War, in which players earned points by correctly identifying the individuals depicted (and whether they were, in fact, patriot heroes, that is, of the Union, or traitors, that is officers who had betrayed their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States by joining the Slaveholders' Rebellion). Readers who claim to see political subtext in many of our current videogames will not be surprised to find that it existed even in games so old.

Although successful, Patriot Heroes was somewhat controversial with the devout, since it was, after all, a card game, and thus associated with gambling, even if remotely; Bradley's next project was Sunday School Cards, with similar gameplay, but designed to inculcate biblical quotations.

Through the end of the 1860s, the Milton Bradley Company gradually expanded; while a steady flow of games continued (including versions of classic boardgames such as Fox and Geese), Bradley's next hit was not something we would call a game at all, today, although he marketed it as such: it was the Myrioptican. It consisted of a roll of paper, printed in color with instructive scenes, turned on a crank before a lantern; accompanying it was a text for the presenter to read. The first roll produced depicted scenes from the Civil War, with a suitably patriotic narration for the presenter; Bradley both drew the original images, and wrote the text. As a follow-up, he began producing Zoetrope machines -- Shea maintains that the Bradley company was the first US operation to do so, though my guess is that he's not reliable here (since his sources are internal Bradley company documents, and a great deal of experimentation along these lines was going on during the period).

In 1866, Milton Bradley produced his first Croquet set. While the game was not original with him (there was a fad for the game at the time), there was then no generally accepted set of rules, which, in so brutal and competitive a game, often led to arguments and even blows. Bradley codified the rules (his version covered by a gameplay patent), and the modern accepted American rules are a direct descendant.

In 1868, Bradley made the acquaintance of Edward Wiebe, and the result was an eventual change away from his work as a game designer, though his eponymous firm continued to publish games to which his contribution was increasingly minor. Wiebe, a German immigrant and music instructor, had written a book about the kindergarten, the German educational movement for small children that had its own didactic and educational theories, somewhat similar to those of the Montessori movement. The next year, the company published Wiebe's book (Paradise of Children, a Practical Guide to Kindergarteners), rewritten by Bradley and billed as a collaboration; it became one of the touchstones of the kindergarten movement in the United States, and ultimately led the Milton Bradley Company to become one of the major manufacturers of educational supplies for American schools. Indeed, while our interest is, of course, in Bradley's influence on the form of the game, his more enduring legacy is probably in the educational realm.

By the 1890s, the ever-expanding Bradley catalog included a slew of educational inventions, including the first watercolor sets with consistent and standardized colors; colored multiplication sticks, the precursors to Cuisinaire rods; play-store supplies; education games such as Bradley's Word Builder and Bradley's Sentence Builder; and the first crayon packages with consistent and standardized colors.

It is worth noting that, of course, Milton Bradley did not consider himself a "game designer," since, of course, the term wasn't coined until the late 20th century. He considered himself an "inventor," and indeed he was in many ways a perfect exemplar of the 19th Century Yankee inventor. Among his other inventions, in fact, was the one-armed paper cutter -- if you work in a design or publishing business, there's almost certainly one in your office, of essentially the same design as Bradley's original version.

Bradley was twice married. He married Vilona Eaton in 1860; she died in 1867 of one of those swift and inexplicable illnesses so prevalent in an era before antibiotics. In 1868, he married Ellen Thayer, whom he met at the house of his friend George Tapley. Bradley died in 1911, after another swift illness, and was survived by his wife and two daughters.

The Milton Bradley Company survived as an independent firm until 1984, when it, like every other great American tabletop game publisher, was enfolded in Hasbro's suffocating embrace.

References:

It's All in the Game, James J. Shea as told to Charles Mercer, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1980

The Game Makers, Philip E. Orbanes, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2004

American Games, Alex G. Malloy, Antique Trader Books, Iola, WI, 2000

Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days (2nd ed.), F.R.B. Whitehouse, Priory Press, Royston, Harts., 1971