“The point of the game is to pass the time.” “The point is not to win or lose, or even to finish,” wrote Samira Kawash, a former professor emeritus at Rutgers University and author of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, in The Journal of Play. Now stabled next to Monopoly by Hasbro, the game became popular at the height of the polio epidemic, which kept millions of children indoors during the summers of the late 1940s and early ’50s. Unlike, say, Monopoly, it’s escapist, easy to focus on, light on rules, and more about discovery than competition - players can’t do anything to affect one another or engender bad feelings. The kids in the polio ward understandably loved it. Designed by a San Diegan schoolteacher and polio patient named Eleanor Abbot in 1948, Candy Land was conceived as a kid-friendly time killer. It is, in other words, the perfect family board game for lockdown. Players don’t compete so much as settle into a liminal state of neither-here-nor-there, floating about candy scenes until it’s time to reshuffle the deck - yet again - and pull up the same cards that they just pulled, this time in a different order.
But winning isn’t really the point of Candy Land no one is ever really meaningfully ahead and it often feels like no one ever will win. When someone wins, making it to the gingerbread house with the “Home Sweet Home” sign, the event feels random and, as a result, anti-climactic.