El Estanciero

El Estanciero is a board game for three to six players, sold in a flat rectangular box under a looping red script logo. The board is a track of numbered squares around a central landscape of an estancia, with herds and poplars. The squares are Argentine provinces, each split into a northern, central and southern zone, together with railways, a sugar mill, an oil company and a winery, and the corners hold the Comisaría and its Marche Preso. Players buy zones, complete provinces and build chacras and estancias on them, the small and large houses that raise the rent.

The game's beginnings are told by the Klavins family. In 1937 Juan Klavins, a Latvian seaman put ashore at Rosario by the Depression, and his partner Harold Lundborg bought the Estanciero name from a friend and began printing the game themselves, as Casa Estanciero, near the Luna Park in Buenos Aires. Spanish Wikipedia and the present maker date it to 1942 instead; this page uses the later year.

Its likeness to Monopoly, patented in the United States in 1935, Clarín calls a controversial subject; the Estanciero trademark's lawyers describe an amicable coexistence, with details changed when the American owner asked. Yet El Estanciero turned the game into a map of Argentina: land is ranched, not developed, and the board pays a Premio Ganadero and charges an income tax. It became so familiar that Argentines say of debased money that it is worth less than an Estanciero banknote.

Casa Estanciero made the game until the mid-1990s, when the family licensed the name. Toyco of Avellaneda has made it since, selling the Tradicional beside newer editions and an 80th anniversary set. The board has been redrawn in colour and the box changed more than once, but the zones, the railways, the Comisaría and the little chacras and estancias are those of the older sets that collectors photograph.