Candy Land Is Not The Board Game You Remember
An excerpt from our new issue, Candy Land, by Elaine Mao
Cake friends,
Did you ever play Candy Land as a kid? The saccharine board game has been a rec room staple since its release in the 1950s, and its cast of characters, like the creepy Lord Licorice, have a nostalgic quality for many. But as Elaine Mao writes in Candy Land, the board game has actually undergone a dizzying number of reinventions since its release that mirror global events themselves. Read on for a full excerpt of her piece, “Candy Land: A Revisionist History.” If you enjoy it, please consider supporting our work by ordering a copy of the magazine.
P.S. The pitch call for our sixth issue, Daily Bread, is live now through August 29!
Candy Land: A Revisionist History.
Candy Land has always been a sweet escape from reality. Dreamed up in 1948 by a retired schoolteacher convalescing in a polio ward, the board game was designed as a diversion for children afflicted with the highly contagious, paralysis-inducing, and potentially deadly disease, which disproportionately affected the young.
In Candy Land, there is neither decision-making nor chance—players only follow directions, moving their pawn based on the card they’ve drawn from the top of the deck. Since the order of the deck is fixed from the starting shuffle, “playing” the game merely entails slowly revealing a predetermined fate. It was the ideal game for the circumstances: easy to learn even for very young children, easy to play for those with mobility issues, and easy to love—a rainbow-hued, saccharine reprieve from the grim reality of life in the polio ward.
The game quickly outgrew its origins, finding mainstream success that lasted long after the polio epidemic faded. Since its publication by Milton Bradley (maker of other iconic games like Chutes and Ladders and The Game of Life), Candy Land has sold roughly one million copies per year, ranking as one of the bestselling children’s board games of all time.
Compared to other popular games, Candy Land is unstimulating, with minimal educational value. Its appeal lies in the land itself, a finely tuned feel-good fantasy that draws players in. But, to remain eternally enticing, Candy Land has changed with the times. The game’s first few decades saw periodic artwork updates (a common occurrence among board games), but when Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley and the game in 1984, it ushered in a new era, introducing a storyline and a cast of characters to the previously uninhabited landscape. In subsequent iterations, these new elements underwent a dizzying series of reinventions mirroring and refracting changes in the real world. The resulting fantasy is a game that subtly perpetuates the status quo by sugarcoating unpleasant realities to promote its proposition of a frictionless consumerism with no bad vibes.
1949
Polio cases climbed in the late 1940s, peaking in 1952. By then, the only thing Americans feared more was nuclear annihilation. On the inaugural Candy Land board, a fair-skinned, rosy-cheeked boy and girl traverse a mildly whimsical landscape with no visible inhabitants, traveling more than 170 miles past Candy Hearts, a Crooked Old Peanut Brittle House, and a Molasses Swamp to get home. The boy sports a leg brace (a nod to polio recovery) and the home is a modest cottage atop a grassy hillside. The leg brace swiftly vanished in subsequent printings of this edition, still many years before a polio vaccine was made widely available in the mid-1950s.
1955
The post-war 1950s gave rise to a particular flavor of the American Dream: increased consumerism, suburban homeownership, and the nuclear family. Decades of discriminatory redlining meant this dream was a segregated one, yielding a racial divide on the United States map later described in a 1975 Parliament song as “chocolate city, vanilla suburbs.”
The “home sweet home” is now edible, with a pink frosted roof, vanilla sponge walls, and its own version of the white picket fence: red-and-white striped pep- permint. 1978 The game’s tagline changes from “A sweet little game for sweet little folks” to the straightforward “A child’s first game.”
1984
During the Cold War era, the US government attempted to overthrow dozens of foreign regimes to further domestic strategy and business interests, under the guise of spreading freedom and democracy.
In Candy Land, the newly introduced Lord Licorice attempts a coup of his own. In an all-new storyline, he has hidden King Kandy and his castle, causing widespread despair among the game’s now numerous inhabitants: a furry green troll named Plumpy, an ax-carrying clown named Mr. Mint, a jester-costumed alien named Jolly, the matronly Gramma Nutt, Princess Lolly, Queen Frostine, and a “more goosome than gruesome” molasses monster named Gloppy. Even the landscape itself mourns the king’s absence: “the Gumdrop Mountains grow paler and paler every day the King’s away!” Kandy’s rule is legitimized as natural, while Lord Licorice is the villain, personifying a reviled candy (with accompanying “Bitter Chocolate Bats,” for further unpalatability).
In a complex world of moral ambiguity and widespread inequality, there is comfort in the myth of objectively discernible good and evil, and the inevitability of justice. No matter how many times you play the game, the castle is found by the winning player because it’s right at the end of the path. Lord Licorice never prevails because the good guys always win . . . right?
2002
The “good guys” won—the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the United States emerged from the Cold War as the indisputable world superpower, and the next decade was a period of optimism and technological progress. But by the dawn of the new millennium, the expansive promise of the era dissipated with the apocalyptic anxiety of Y2K, the burst of the dot-com bubble, and the 9/11 attacks, which kicked off an indefinite war on terror.
Candy Land becomes an ever safer space to retreat. The flimsy Lord Licorice plot of previous decades is gone; the imperative is simply to “see where the rainbow path leads you.” Lord Licorice is now merely “tricky” rather than “grim,” with his residence diminished from Licorice Castle to Licorice Forest.
Public concern about the environment increased in the nineties but subsequently lost momentum, outweighed by the demands of capitalism. Correspondingly, Candy Land’s landscape shifts to forestall any discomfort about the environmental degradation of the outside world. Queen Frostine, previously “adrift on an Ice Cream Float in an Ice Cream Sea,” was perhaps too reminiscent of a polar bear atop a melting ice cap in a warming world. She is now Princess Frostine, skating across Snow Flake Lake. (It’s unclear, though, why Frostine, previously Kandy’s wife, is now his daughter, while the previously Princess Lolly is now a civilian.)
Plumpy, once dubbed “The Last of the PlumpaTrolls,” disappears entirely, an unwelcome reminder of accelerated extinction rates. Mr. Mint, the ax-wielding lumberjack of the Peppermint Forest, coexists alongside a happy beaver. Introduced during a decade of peak deforestation, Mr. Mint normalizes the pillaging of natural resources by positioning a lumberjack as the obvious steward of a forest.
The party of children at the starting line doubles to four, now including children of Asian and Black ancestry.
2010
The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 sent the United States into a deep recession, widening the already sizable wealth gap.
Candy Land is more utopian than ever. The working class is obsolete and only the leisure class remains—no character engages in productive labor. Mr. Mint is gone, his Peppermint Forest converted into Ice Cream Slopes where you can snowboard with the Duke of Swirl. Even Jolly is eliminated by modernity, which has routed a “chewy choo-choo” through the Gummy Hills (formerly Gumdrop Mountains). Royalty abounds. With the restoration of Lolly’s princesshood, only Gramma Gooey (née Nutt) is without a regal title. The game’s tagline is now “Kingdom of Sweet Adventures,” with a new premise: “King Kandy has invited you to his castle for an extraordinary celebration in your honor!”
2013
The economic recession sowed widespread resentment over economic inequality and a government beholden to corporate interests, culminating in the Occupy movement of 2011.
The latest Candy Land iteration ousts the Duke of Swirl with his wealthy 1% vibe, restoring an ice-skating Mr. Mint.
Kandy, meanwhile, amasses a military to safeguard his empire, with Buckingham Palace-esque jellybean guards and a gummy bear knight—the first and only time the game acknowledges the violent underpinnings of power.
The children themselves are replaced with anthropomorphized sweets. In a blending of fantasy and reality, the player is no longer a visitor to Candy Land; they are part of it.
In the outside world, the 99% were no longer buying into the foundational American myths of capitalist meritocracy and upward mobility, recognizing that the deck was figuratively stacked from the beginning. Candy Land, however, would be a true Land of Opportunity. In a fundamental gameplay update, the deck of cards is replaced with a spinner, trading out determinism for chance.
2014
The spinner is so widely detested that Hasbro reverts the change the following year.
2021
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement illuminated the structural inequality ingrained in American society, prompting a public reckoning for many institutions, at least superficially.
Candy Land is now billed as a post-racial, equal opportunity society. Kandy is in an interracial relationship with Frostine, who is Black and also no longer his daughter. Their daughter, Princess Lolly, is Asian.
Jolly returns, transformed from his previous appearance as dinosaur into a sharply dressed Black man. The newly introduced Chocolate Falls are the domain of a Black woman named Duchess E. Claire. Mr. Mint is now Mayor Mint, using a wheelchair that doubles as a toboggan.
Lord Licorice is gone. King Kandy has established total dominion. Previously, he awaited you at the entrance to his castle, but now he greets you at the start with a sweeping gesture that encompasses all the land. Candy Land has undergone many changes, but in the end, it’s still a white man’s world.
2024
As vaccination rates decline, polio has started to make a comeback. Candy Land celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary—now, as before, as always, the ideal game for the circumstances.
Hasbro could not be reached for comment.
Elaine Mao is a writer who doesn’t eat the free candy that arrives with the check but does save it for later; her coat pockets and bag are full of assorted candy in various stages of disintegration.
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Go: Paper + Dirt bookstore in Pittsburgh is kicking off their inaugural event series Word of Mouth with a special evening of bites and conversation inspired by Candy Land. We’re honored! It’s happening on September 4 and tickets are live now.
Eat: Stacey Mei Yan Fong (author of 50 Pies, 50 States and a Humble Pie contributor) has a pop up at Haricot Vert's Dreamworld in Brooklyn on Saturday, August 31 and Sunday, September 1. She’ll be selling mini pies with flavors like mermaid marshmallow and strawberry chiffon!
Buy: Rose Los Angeles and Olive Odyssey just released four new flavors of their Turkish Delight-esque edibles developed by chefs Fadi Kattan, Samin Nosrat, Reem Assil, and Andy Baraghani. The collab benefits Thamra, an organization dedicated to fresh food production in Gaza, and you can hear more about it in a recent interview with Aliza and Olive Odyssey on the TASTE podcast.
Cook: Creamy, custard-y chocoflan by Shilpa Uskokovic. In the oven, the two layers of fudgy chocolate cake and cream cheese-based flan magically swap places.
“It is still a white mans world”…. What Cakes failed to mention is that the game was invented by a white man as well as the company owner who manufactures it is. I threw out the DEI version and bought an original. We play it together after eating pancakes with Aunt Jamima syrup.
This is so fascinating. I haven’t played Candy Land since I was a child (the Lord Licorice and the bitter bats years) and I had no idea they made all these changes over the years. It makes me think about how The Game of Life has changed to keep up with the times. I remember playing it as a child and you had to get married, but when I played a more recent version at a family gathering, you can now make a choice to stay single or get married. It’s interesting to think about how these children’s games reflect the times AND the political landscape when you dig a little deeper.