A look at some of our more-successful fellow board game designers; also posted on the CWatKPCN group site.
-A Journey Through Europe (1759), invented by John Jefferys, is the earliest board game with a known inventor.
-Monopoly as we know it was not invented by any one person, though Charles Darrow (who is, coincidentally, the first board game designer to be a millionaire) is often credited with its conception. The earliest known version of Monopoly, called The Landlord's Game, was made by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.
-Scrabble, another popular board game, was invented by an architect with
an unfortunate surname, Alfred Mosher Butts. Not sure how he got his 10,000
hours in, unless architecture and board game design have some secret link that I'm missing.
-Mathematicians can invent games too! John Forbes Nash Jr. studied differential geometry (I think it's Euclidean though, more's the pity) and game theory, among other topics. He was one of the inventors of the board game Hex. He is quite an interesting character in and of himself-- there's got Hollywood movie (A Beautiful Mind) about him and his schizophrenia, if anybody's interested.
-If your name is Steve Jackson, you may want to try game design as a line of work. Two Steve Jacksons have already been successful doing so. There's the American Steve Jackson, who founded a Steve Jackson Games, the headquarters of which were raided by the U.S. Secret Service in 1990. There's also the British one, who focuses on video games. I wonder if they're related...