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Playing for Yale
An aficionado takes a look at Yale on board.
December 1995
by David Galt ’66
David Galt, an authority on games, playing cards, and their history, provided technical advice for Robert Redford’s 1994 film, Quiz Show.
Yale may be at the top of today’s academic heap, but (as some alumni never tire of pointing out) there was a time when it also dominated the national athletic scene. Indeed, only a century ago, the football and basketball teams from Yale and the rest of what came to be known as the Ivy League generated a level of sporting enthusiasm equalled today only by the likes of Ohio State and UCLA.
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Eli athletes dominated much of the nation’s parlor game industry. |
It all began, of course, in 1869, when Princeton and Rutgers squared off in America’s first intercollegiate “foot ball” game. But soon Yale, led by the legendary Walter Camp, would be at the forefront of nearly every major football development. And Yale’s final two games of the season—against Princeton and Harvard—quickly grew to become the Superbowls of their
era.
The renown of Yale athletics was not lost on manufacturers of toys and games. In the 1890s, any young boy or girl might be thrilled to find McLoughlin Brothers' The Yale-Princeton Foot Ball Game, or Parker Brothers' The Yale-Harvard Game under the Christmas tree. Indeed, Montgomery Ward & Co.’s 1894–95 mail-order catalog billed The Yale-Harvard Game as “A High Class Game for Thoughtful Players.” Back then it would have cost you 85 cents. Nowadays, this extremely rare game is worth
2,000 times that price!
Inside The Yale-Princeton Foot Ball Game’s multicolored box you’ll find a curious gridiron of gold, yellow, and red hexagons. Action scenes surround its border. Fans pack the stands, or take a more comfortable view from atop horse-drawn carriages. The official seals and banners of Yale and Princeton adorn the board’s corners. Eli owners of a first edition could feel especially proud when the Blue ended the 1894 season 16–0.
Although football had put college athletics on the map, other sports were also represented in Yale-based games. The designers of College Boat Race (1900)—a large McLoughlin game—rendered the oarsmen’s racing togs in crimson and blue. (The colors of the uniforms clearly evoke both schools, although the makers avoided Y’s and H's, evidently preferring to make the game sufficiently generic to attract the widest audience.) The 1906 Great American Game Base Ball, by William O. Dapping of Auburn, New York, featured Yale and Harvard players on the baseball diamond. College, issued in 1908 by the College Game Company of Philadelphia, included a deck of 60 cards, the four suits of which were Penn, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell. The publisher lauded it as “The Greatest Game on Earth.”
Yale’s sporting prominence made it by far the most frequent collegiate subject for gamesmakers in the first part of the century, but the onset of World War I put athletics at Yale and elsewhere on hold, and all but eliminated the manufacture of such lighthearted diversions. When the war ended, however, the resumption of normal life sparked a resurgence of college sports-and Yale-related games. Lavelle’s Yale-Harvard Football Game was published in 1922 in New Haven. YA-LO the Football Card Game was introduced in 1925 by E. J. Graber of Columbus, Ohio, and Star Basketball, produced in 1927 by the Star Paper Box Company of Chicago, shows what appear to be Yale and Harvard players dueling on the court.
Games were hardly the only popular products to call upon the Blue imprint in the early days of the century. In pulp periodicals, the whole nation followed Dick Merriwell’s fictional heroics for Yale. One could also purchase Yale playing cards, toy bulldogs, chocolate bars, and tins of tobacco; one advertisement even showed a Yale football captain endorsing Lucky Strikes.
Although the golden age of the board game is now long departed, you might still capture the spirit of “playing for Yale” with a game of Yaleopoly, put out just four years ago by the Sky Production Company of Cincinnati. (Landing on Handsome Dan will cost you $90.) Somehow, though, the campus as real estate doesn’t quite match the appeal of the gridiron in the days of raccoon coats, flasks, and the original The Game.  |
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