CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · General Reference

Pay Day (board game)

board game

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ17256
Source-derived summary

Pay Day is a board game originally made by Parker Brothers (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) in 1974. It was invented by Paul J. Gruen of West Newbury, Massachusetts, United States, one of the era's top board game designers, and his brother-in-law Charles C. Bailey. It was Gruen's most successful game, outselling Monopoly in its first production year. Pay Day is currently marketed by Winning Moves Games USA.

The game simulates money management, with the game board resembling a calendar month. Before the game, the players decide how many months to be played (i.e. how many times to travel across the board). During the game, players accumulate bills and expenses to pay, along with collecting their monthly wage on "pay day" at the end of the month. The winner is the player who has the most money at the end of the last month of play.

Rules (original 1974-era)

Object

The object is to be the player who has the most cash and savings at the end of the game. Players decide in advance how many in-game months will be played.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pay Day (board game)” is board game. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through board and game, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1974—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1974. For this dossier, board and game is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “board game” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17256. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Pay Day (board game)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Pay Day (board game) primary sources, Pay Day (board game) archive and board research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Pay Day (board game)”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Pay Day (board game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.