The Mansion of Happiness

The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement is a children's board game first published in England in 1800 by Laurie and Whittle, designed by George Fox and inspired by Christian moral teaching. Players move markers around a spiral track of sixty-seven spaces, each representing a virtue or a vice; landing on a virtue space such as honesty or piety advances the player toward the track's end, while landing on a vice space such as cruelty or immodesty sends the player backward or otherwise penalizes them. The goal is to be the first player to reach the Mansion of Happiness at the center of the spiral, a design that turns the ordinary race-game structure into a lesson in moral consequences aimed at instructing children through play rather than only entertaining them. An American edition followed shortly after the original English printing.