Here's a brief history of some classic games:

MONOPOLY: An estimated 480 million players around the world have been intrigued by this game since its introduction in 1935. It was invented by a man named Charles Darrow, who played a game on oil cloth in 1933 on his kitchen table and liked the promise of fame and fortune. He produced his own game and sold it to friends and family. When orders exceeded his ability to produce them, he went to Parker Brothers, who rejected it because of 52 design errors. But when the homemade games continued to sell, Parker Brothers decided to buy the rights after all.

LIFE: In 1860, Milton Bradley was a successful lithographer who sold, among other things, portraits of Abraham Lincoln. But when Lincoln grew a beard, Bradley's clean-shaven lithograph fell out of favor, so he came up with a game called "The Checkered Game of Life" to save his business. It was an immediate success.

In 1959, when Milton Bradley executives asked a game inventor to come up with something for the 100th anniversary of the company, he found the original game and updated it in the version introduced in 1960.

SCRABBLE: One-hundred million sets of this game have been sold worldwide and between 1 million and 2 million are sold each year. Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., set out to invent a board game that would use both skill and chance. He combined features of anagrams and crossword puzzles. To decide on letter distribution, he studied the front page of The New York Times and did detailed calculations of letter frequency — which has stayed the same through the game's history.

CLUE: A solicitor's clerk named Anthony E. Pratt invented the classic "whodunit" game in 1944. After perfecting the mechanics, he took it to Waddington's Games in Leeds, England. Due to postwar shortages, the game was not actually launched until 1949. Today, it is sold in more than 40 countries from Brazil to Abu Dhabi.

---

Sources: Hasbro, which now owns Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley