Pollyanna, the Book and the Game

Somehow, I missed reading Pollyanna while growing up—probably because the title was a girl’s name and as a young boy I knew that anything involving girls was likely to give you cooties.  (It is rather ironic that how to avoid catching cooties turned out to be rather useful during the pandemic.)  Accordingly, I never read Pollyanna or any of the Nancy Drew books while reading all of the Hardy Boys, Rick Bryant, and Tom Swift series.

There was a movie version of the book in 1960, and I may have seen it, but the only theater in town at the time was a drive-in theater and during any movie by Disney not involving John Wayne or Fess Parker, I usually spent my time in the playground directly below the screen paying scant attention to the movie.  Evidently, Hayley Mills was wonderful, but I’ll just have to take IMDB’s word for it.  I was going to watch the movie and call it research for this blog….but the Disney Channel insists I cough up a lung just to watch it.  Instead, I read the book and watched the 1919 silent version starring Mary Pickford.  Though there are eight different movie versions, the silent one was the only version available for free on YouTube.

Truthfully, I didn’t learn much watching the silent movie except that it was fairly faithful to the book.  I may have missed something because I got interested in researching the biography of Mary Pickford and forgot to watch most of the middle part of the movie.  You really don’t learn much from listening to the dialogue of a silent movie.  (Did you know, for example, that when Mary Pickford was called as a witness in a trial, a lawyer took advantage of the situation by asking her, under oath, to state her age?  Pickford answered, “Twenty-one, going on twenty.”)

Having read the book, I can tell you that it truly sucks.  The author, Eleanor H. Porter, was a turn of the century author of a long list of rather boring books that were published between 1910 and 1920, all of which were incredibly bad, even for that period.  The exception, supposedly, is Pollyanna, published in 1913, and became an overnight sensation and started a cottage industry of sequels that continued even after Porter’s death.

Pollyanna was a young girl who invariably saw the good in every situation, usually by playing the “Glad Game”, invented by her father, a poor minister.  Periodically, the Ladies’ Aid Society would send the minister a barrel of hand-me-down items to aid in his ministry.  When Pollyanna, hoping to find a doll, emerged from the barrel with a pair of crutches, her father told her she should be glad, if only because she didn’t need the crutches.  The ‘Glad Game’ and how Pollyanna taught the game to a town full of self-centered and heartless people and transformed them into lovable Stepford peasants is the basis of all of the books in the series. 

The book, hopelessly schmaltzy, is heavily influenced by Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer—even to the similarities in the names of several characters, orphans raised by spinster aunts, and faithful servants.  Unfortunately, the book does not have any of the same wit, satire, and insight into society.  You can read it for yourself, for free, here. 

The book came out in 1913, and became so popular that Parker Bros. did a product tie-in, producing a board game called Pollyanna, the Glad Game.  The game was patented in 1915, but did not go on sale until 1916.  George Parker, the founder of the company and developer of most of the early games, did what any good company in a rush to deliver a product would do—they took an existing game and modified it just enough not to be sued and claimed they had invented it.  In this case, the original game was Parcheesi. 

Note.  A lot of games were modeled after Parcheesi.  When I showed a friend the game of Pollyanna, she said how much it reminded her of a game she had played in Germany, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht.  I looked up the game, and sure enough, it was based on Parcheesi.    In the US, Aggravation is a popular game.  In England, they play Ludo or Snakes and Ladders.  Or you could play Ashte Kashte, Chaupur, Patolli, Parques, Sorry and a host of other games, all of which are versions of Parcheesi, which in turn was based on the ancient Indian game Pachisi. 

Parker Brothers owned the rights to the game, and brought it out every few years, usually when a new motion picture version of the book was released, with only minor cosmetic changes to the playing board.  For a brief period, the game was known as Dixie Pollyanna, but the rules of the game and use of dice remained constant.  For a brief time, there was an “adult” version of the game called “Parker Brothers Track Pursuit Game.”

I became aware of the game through my son, The-Other-One (not What’s-His-Name) and his wife, The Leprechaun.  Her family was addicted to the game and played it at family reunions and other gatherings.  Since the game was no longer commercially available, they made their own boards and held tournaments.  Naturally, over time, the rules had been allowed to evolve a little.  The way they played, for example, each player had his own color coded dice and at the end of a player’s turn, if the player had forgotten and left the dice on the board, any other player was allowed to pick up the dice and throw them in any direction—usually under a sofa—forcing that player to scramble and search for the dice.  This was definitely not an original rule for The Happy Game.  It does, however, speed up play.

My wife, The Doc, and I really enjoyed the game and began a search for a game of our own.  Eventually, we found an ancient board from EBay and assembled our own game, noting a few changes between the original game and the more modern version we had played at my son’s house.  Eventually, we even located a source for the original rules, available here.

I found one of the changes to the rules particularly interesting.  If a player positions two pieces on the same square, other players cannot pass this barrier.  My son’s in-laws called this barrier a wall, but the original rules refer to this as a blockade, an important distinction at the time when the game was first published in 1915.  In 1898, the U. S. Navy sent ships to blockade the ports of Cuba, preventing ships from Spain from entering.  At the time, a blockade was considered an act of war, forcing the proud country of Spain to declare war against the United States despite the fact that a single capital ship of the United States was quite capable of destroying the entire Spanish Navy.  When the US used the navy to prevent the Soviet Union from shipping nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro, they were very careful to refer to it as a quarantine. 

My son’s version of the game has a few other distinctions.  There are a few more spaces on each side, meaning pieces have to move a little farther on each side, a change that I believe adds to the strategic nature of the game.  At right is the version of the board as played today.  I think the game deserves a new life, and since it is no longer available, I suggest you make your own, using the board my son made as a guide.  You will also need a pair of dice (or more if you want to play by the new rules) and four sets of four differently colored pieces, all of which are available from Amazon.

I promise, you don’t have to read the book to play the game.