Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.
The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.
It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.
edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.
It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.