A closer look
Candy Land was designed in 1948 by Eleanor Abbott, a retired schoolteacher who was actively recovering from polio in a San Diego hospital ward. She noticed that the children in the polio ward were incredibly bored and suffering from the painful treatments, so she drew a magical fantasy board with colorful squares that required zero reading skills or complex strategies. The game relies entirely on drawing cards, meaning adults and small children are on completely equal footing, which is a polite way of saying it requires absolutely no cognitive thought whatsoever. It was quickly bought by Milton Bradley and became a staple of American childhoods, masking a deeply tragic origin story behind a sickeningly sweet facade of peppermint forests and gumdrop mountains
