You can compete with up to four players to see who can create the largest settlements, roads, and army. Unlike maps printed on paper, silk maps also wouldn't rustle and attract the attention of enemy guards, she said. Catan fans will love this online version, which stays true to the original game. But paper maps proved too fragile and cumbersome, said Debbie Hall, a cataloguer in the map room at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.įor hundreds of years, even before World War II, silk was the material of choice for military maps, Hall said, because it wouldn't tear or dissolve in water as easily as paper and was light enough to stuff into a boot or cigarette packet. Of all the tools in a military-grade escape kit, the most critical item was the map. So how did a simple board game end up in a position to help out one of the most powerful military forces on the planet? Silk and serendipity. 'It was ingenious,' said Philip Orbanes, author of several books on Monopoly, including 'The World's Most Famous Game and How it Got That Way.' 'The Monopoly box was big enough to not only hold the game but hide everything else they needed to get to POWs.'īritish historians say it could have helped thousands of captured soldiers escape.
