Big Dot Games
Games crafted with love.
A tireless focus on fun.
We are a small studio in love with games as objects, as artefacts, as conversations across decades. We build them slowly. We test them obsessively. We ship them when they are ready, and not before.
The Landlords
Based on Lizzie J. Magie's 1904 Landlord's Game, the radical ancestor of Monopoly. Play by her original rules or modern ones, at the table or online.
From the Diary
Devlogs, design notes and the odd letter from the workshop.
- Entry Nº 04
The Anspach Decade
Part three of our history of Lizzie Magie's Landlord's Game. How a Berkeley economics professor who designed a game called Anti-Monopoly accidentally spent the next ten years in court — and, in losing his sabbatical, his savings, and most of his health, finally dragged the truth about Monopoly out from under forty years of corporate myth.
- Entry Nº 03
The Atlantic City Quakers
Part two of our history of Lizzie Magie's Landlord's Game. How a teacher named Ruth Hoskins arrived at a Friends school in 1929, redrew Lizzie's board with the streets outside her window, and quietly invented the version every Monopoly player since has been playing.
- Entry Nº 02
The Landlord's Game — A History
A century-and-change ago, a stenographer in Maryland sat down to make a board game that would teach her neighbours about land economics. It became, by way of theft and a long lawsuit, the best-selling board game on Earth. Here is what actually happened.