The true story of Candy Land and its creator Eleanor Abbott

Eleanor Abbott set out to help sick kids pass the time and accidentally created one of the greatest board games ever

Polio swept through the United States in the ‘40s. By 1948, it was a full-on epidemic that led to 42,173 cases and 2,720 deaths in 1949 alone — and young children were the most vulnerable. Eleanor Abbott was around 38 years old when she contracted polio. At the time, she’d worked repairing watches for a jewelry store. While recovering in a San Diego hospital, she was struck by the number of children impacted by the disease. They were lonely, bored, and in pain.

Perhaps because of her experience writing short stories, Abbott dreamed of a whimsical escape, a colorful board game with a bright, candy theme that could be played by children of virtually any age. The goal of Candy Land remains a simple one: proceed down the winding road to reach home, drawing from a deck of cards with colored squares and symbols matching the path. Because you don’t need to count or read — simply match the color and move to that space — that accessed a huge market for an untapped playerbase.

In doing so, Abbott created something unusual: a game with no strategy, no reading, and no real way to fail. Candy Land stripped away nearly every barrier that defined board games at the time — and in the process, became an accidental phenomenon. It would also be the only game Abbott ever created.

Abbott’s first prototype was drawn on butcher paper in her kitchen, with the colorful trail looping its way through a fantastical land full of candy-themed places. She brought that first version back to the polio ward, and the children loved it.

“Typically, children in polio wards had few toys to entertain them between grueling daily treatments that included the forced stretching of muscles in rigid limbs,” reads a recent feature in The New York Times about Abbott’s legacy. “Quarantine protocols meant that they had little contact with their families. The days were long and lonely.”

Perhaps because Candy Land’s path squiggles around the board in a similar fashion to Milton Bradley’s Uncle Wiggily, the children encouraged Abbott to submit her game to the company. At the time, most of Milton Bradley’s business was in school supplies. Uncle Wiggily, which stars a dapper rabbit, has similar mechanics to Candy Land, but it requires that players read the simple instructions on the cards they draw. Candy Land provided an even more accessible alternative that could reach an even younger audience — one that didn’t require parents to play with them.

That lack of challenge wasn’t a flaw. It was the entire point. Candy Land wasn’t built to challenge players. It was built to transport them. Perhaps because of its unique approach, Candy Land became an instant hit for Milton Bradley that allowed the company to rival the monopoly that Parker Brothers had in the board game space with, well, Monopoly.

The timing also couldn’t have been better for Candy Land in the midst of the post-World War II baby boom and a thriving American economy. “There was a huge market—it was parents who had kids and money to spend on them,” Christopher Bensch, the chief curator at the National Toy Hall of Fame, told PBS in 2018. “A number of social and economic factors were coming together for [games] that were released in the [post-war era] that has kept them as evergreen classics.”

Despite its commercial success, Candy Land remained focused on children stricken with polio. In basically every version of the game, a person-sized Ginger Bread man welcomes children to Candy Land with open arms, then they go on to explore places like the Gumdrop Mountains and the Peppermint Stick Forest. In the first version of the game, one of the children depicted has a thin line running down his leg that many say resembles a brace of some kind. Even within the game itself, Candy Land is a place of comfort for sick kids.

Abbott never turned Candy Land into a career. She didn’t build a catalog of games or chase another hit. Instead, she gave much of what she earned away to help others, supporting children and local schools in San Diego.

Candy Land went on to sell more than 50 million copies and become one of the most recognizable board games ever made. Its creator, meanwhile, remained a one-and-done success story — someone who solved a very specific problem for a very specific group of kids, and in doing so, made something that persists even today as an iconic board game enjoyed by people of all ages.