Review: ‘Monopoly X’ says the board game helped win World War II

Chris Hewitt, The Minnesota Star Tribune

You think books have covered everything there is to write about World War II skullduggery, and then you stumble upon the book about how spies used Monopoly to pull the wool over Nazis’ eyes.

The endlessly popular and sometimes just plain endless game figured into the war in several ways, according to “Monopoly X,” by game designer and expert Philip E. Orbanes: Soldiers and others filled downtime by buying up Park Place and Atlantic Avenue, of course. But, less conventionally, some spies were code-named with monikers that echoed the games’ playing pieces, including a quadruple crosser named Harold Cole, who was known as Top Hat, and a female agent that, Orbanes writes, was named Benoîte Jean but called herself Nori (a backwards version of “iron,” a