Produced by the Newbie Games Company of Annan in Dumfriesshire as a “new and fascinating game for old and young alike”, its sponsors were the local Liberal Committee and the foxy features of David Lloyd George are clearly recognisable.
The game, which was apparently sold for one shilling, comprises a folding board, instruction leaflet, dice, four playing pieces and the required currency, property and play cards.
In an April 15 sale held by Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) in Dumfries, it sold online at £550.
Remarkable man
Bid to that same sum as the day’s opening lot was a poorly preserved but scarce 1672, illustrated first of The Hydrostaticks or the Weight, Force and Pressure of Fluid Bodies… by George Sinclair, an engineer and the first professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow.
A remarkable man, Sinclair is also remembered for making a descent in a diving bell to a look at a wreck of one of the Spanish Armada ships lost off the coast of Mull, and for his interest in a very different field, that of witchcraft. In 1685 he published Satan’s Invisible World Discovered.
