I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known antidote to the will to the live. There is a 12 per cent chance that any given game of Monopoly will go on for ever (the other 88 per cent just feel like that). In fact I’m still not convinced that the name isn’t a spelling mistake. The story of Monopoly, on the other hand — now there’s a thing. Specifically, the story of how it was invented.

For decades the accepted version had down-on-his-luck Charles Darrow creating the game in the 1930s, as entertainment for his impoverished family and a reminder of happier times when they’d holidayed in Atlantic City. Then Parker Brothers snapped it up and conquered the world, making themselves and Darrow a pretty penny or several billion in the process. But even as they peddled the tale, the company knew it wasn’t quite true. Several other versions of the game had existed before Darrow’s, and Parker Bros knew this because they went around buying them up. The makers of Easy Money, Finance and Inflation all sold their rights, helping Parker Bros obtain a monopoly on Monopoly.

But one woman would not go gentle into that good compensation arrangement: Lizzie Magie, inventor of The Landlord’s Game, the original version on which all the others were based. Hers was the Ur-Monopoly (yes, she’s the one to blame). Magie had the idea in the early 1900s, the board game acting as an educational tool to promote the ‘single tax’ theory of the 19th-century economist Henry George (he believed the only thing that should be taxed was land). Magie’s social campaigning included advertising herself as a slave to the highest bidder, and writing a paper called ‘A Graphic Description of Hell by One Who Is Actually in It’. Clearly Parker Bros were up against an opponent of a very different nature here.

This book takes a while to marshal its facts, though the author would doubtless reply (fairly, in my opinion) that that’s the whole point — real-life stories are never as simple as large corporations would have you believe. Once Pilon has her ‘Go to Jail’ cards in a row, however, the scene is set for an amusing legal drama.

Ralph Anspach, a dishevelled professor at San Francisco State University in the 1970s, invokes the memory of Lizzie Magie during his battle with Parker Bros over Anti-Monopoly, the board game he has invented to highlight the economic woes that result from monopolies. The company try to close him down, just as they’ve closed down Sexopoly, Space Monopoly, BlackMonopoly and Theopoly (a game designed by priests). They even try to stop two college students publishing a book called 1,000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games, which, given that you’d only be buying it if you’d already bought the game itself, does show a certain lack of imagination.

Along the way we learn that the price tag was invented by Quakers, that there was once an organisation called the British Local Ladies Comfort Society, and that trademark law has given rise to the term ‘genericide’, the process by which your product name becomes so widely used that you lose your rights to it. ‘Heroin’, for instance, was originally the brand name given to the drug by its German manufacturers, while ‘escalator’ was invented by Otis. Next time you’re roped into a game of Monopoly, you should take this book along to help pass the time. You can start on it when you’ve finished Proust.