Ever since the dawn of time when humankind was back home from a hard day’s work and
around the campfire, we’ve tried to find ways to entertain ourselves. The purpose of
which entertainment was to take our minds out of the harsh reality but to also have
a safe environment to hone our skills in. The sharpening of our quick, strategic and
level-headed thinking could be practiced from home now, enter board games!
So what exactly is a board game? According to Merriem-Webster dictionary it’s a game
of strategy played by moving pieces on a board. Although it is true that most board games
require strategic thinking there are exclusions to the rule. And there are so many categories
to classify board games in today. But what about yesterday?
What is surprising is that board games could be older than or as old as written language.
While written language first appears around 3400 B.C., earliest found evidence of a board
game date around the year 3100 B.C. In 2013 Turkish archeologists were excavating
and researching at a place in the southeast of Turkey called Başur Höyük, a 5000 year
old burial site. While excavating they unearthed small carved stones with odd shapes and painted
in different colors of green, red, blue, black and white.
Some depicted dogs, pigs and pyramids while others bullet shaped carved stones.
Even though there were similar findings in North-Eastern Syria and Iraq they were all
isolated, single objects which the researchers believe to be counting stones. The Başur
Höyük pieces were found all together in the same cluster which gave more credence
to the hypothesis that it is a proto-board game of sorts, the strategy and rules of which
still elude us.
A full board game however with surviving pieces
and an intact board was found in Egypt. It was called Senet, which means passage or
gateway in ancient Egyptian, although archeologists think that the full name of the game might
have been the “game of passing”. The oldest surviving boards of Senet date
around 2000-1700 B.C.. The board game however is depicted in hieroglyphs
and murals at least 1100 years earlier. At least by the time of the New Kingdom in
Egypt (1550–1077 BC), senet was conceived as a representation of the journey of the
ka (the vital spark) to the afterlife. The game is also referred to in chapter XVII
of the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is an ancient Egyptian funerary text. (mummy)
The rules of the game are a subject of debate without any definitive evidence.
If you aren’t convinced by now that Egyptians love board games, here is Mehen. Mehen is
another board game originating in Egypt, referencing the snake deity of ancient Egyptian religion.
The gameboard depicts a coiled snake whose body is divided into rectangular spaces. Dated
around 3000 BC besides the physical boards this game also appears in pictures in the
tomb of Hesy-Ra and its name appears in the tomb of Rahotep. The rules of the game however
are lost within the sands of time. Moving on, Egypt was not the only place to
play the most popular of board games archeological records indicate that board games were widely
played in Mesopotamia too. Between the years 1922 and 1934 British archeologists
while digging in the Royal cemetery of Ur, an ancient Sumerian city, present day in Iraq,
found several beautifully crafted boards. These boards were dated around the year 2550-2400
B.C. Beautiful tokens related to the game were found arranged in a row, with the colors
alternating, in another Ur tomb. This board game is now called the Royal Game
of Ur and it is a two-player strategy race board game.
The rules of the Game of Ur as it was played in the second century BC have been preserved
on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.
The rules are as follow: The Game of Ur is played using two sets of
seven checker-like game pieces, movement is dice based and the objective is to move all
seven of the pieces off the board before the enemy does. In the green squares in the middle
your pieces are not safe, if an opponent lands on your piece it gets taken off the board
and has to go back to the beginning something like the modern game Ludo.
This game might be the most popular board game in human history. Not only was it popular
all across the Middle East but boards of this game have been found in Crete, Cyprus and
even in Sri Lanka. Four gameboards bearing resemblance to the
game of Ur were found in the funeral chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun. These gameboards
even came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces and many also had Senet boards
on the reverse sides so that the same board could be used to play either game.
This game declined during late antiquity (5th-6th century AD) although surprisingly enough it
survived among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing
a version of the Game of Ur until the 1950’s.
But back during Roman times there was a popular board game called Ludus duodecim scriptorium which translates to “ game of twelve markings”,
referring most likely to the three rows of 12 markings each found on most surviving boards.
Some consider it to be related to Senet but this has not been proven without a doubt yet.
Very little information about the specifics of gameplay have survived, it is known that
the game was played with 3 cubic dies and each player had 15 pieces. The earliest known
mention of the game is in the poems Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) by the Roman Poet Ovid which
was written somewhere between the year 1 BC and 8 AD.
Onwards to to the 6th century in Asia, during the reign of the Gupta Empire in ancient India
a local game was invented called Chaturanga, looks familiar doesn’t it?
Chaturanga means four divisions in Sanskrit, which in turn means four divisions of the
military, the infantry, cavalry, chariotry and elephants which would in turn evolve into
the modern pawn, knight, bishop and rook. Chaturanga is not a direct ancestor of Chess,
tad later on that, but it also has an 8x8 board like Chess with 16 pieces for each player.
Chaturanga was adopted by the Sassanid Persians somewhere in the
7th century where it became known as Shatranj and Shatranj from the Persians travelled to
Europe where it finally became the Chess we know today, or did it?
The modern rules with which we play chess today have been put down somewhere around
1475, even though the game became available in Europe even as early as the 9th century.
Books about the theory of how to play chess began to appear in that same century too.
A Spanish churchman called Luis Ramirez de Lucena wrote a book called Repetition of Love
and the Art of Playing Chess in 1497 and later on other chess masters like Pedro Damiano,
Giovanni Leonardo di Bona, Giulio Cesare Polerio and Gioachino Greco started to develop elements
of openings and analyzed simple endgames.
After the 15th century people seem to really have become serious and stopped producing
impactful board games, the big bang of board games however was yet to come, a several centuries later.
There is a several centuries worth a gap in the history of board games, only during the
19th century do they make a comeback with Traveller's Tour Through the United States
and its sister game Traveller's Tour Through Europe which were published by New York City
bookseller F. & R. Lockwood in 1822 and today claims the distinction of being the first
board game published in the United States.
The next noteworthy game was based around Christian morality and it was called The Mansion of Happines published in 1843, it sent the players
along a path of virtues and vices that led to the mansion of happiness i.e. Heaven. There
were also some other Christian games later on like the Game of Pope and Pagan and The
Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army (1844).
In 1860, The Checkered Game of Life rewarded players for normal activities such as attending
college, marrying, and getting rich. Daily life rather than eternal life became the focus
of board games. The game was the first to focus on secular virtues rather than religious
virtues, and sold 40,000 copies its first year.
The most famous of all board games is undoubtedly Monopoly. Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,
when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game which was intended as an educational
tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.
I don’t really need to explain much about Monopoly since it’s a very popular game,
it’s a common misconception that Monopoly is a brutal game. But hardcore players know
that friendships aren’t ruined in Monopoly, so I ask you have you heard of Diplomacy?
So Diplomacy is a game first published in 1959, it’s played with 2-7 players, it is
a board wargame. It is distinctive from other boardgames because of its negotiation phases
during which time players form new and betray old alliances with other players, you can
see where that friendship-ruining element comes in. It has some high-profile fans including
Henry Kissinger, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, I’d like to see them roll for initiative.
And now for a game coming out of Europe, from Germany to be precise, called Settlers of
Catan, this game was published in 1995. In the standard version 3 to 4 players play the
game and each of them represent settlers which establish colonies on an imaginary island
called Catan. The objective of the game is to build and develop holdings while trading
and acquiring new resources, players gain points as their holdings grow and the one
who gets to 10 points first, wins the game.
Now in the 21st century there are loads of different board games and new ones are made
every day. A quick look at Kickstarter and you see enthusiastic people with awesome ideas
about a new concept for a board game waiting to become the next Risk or Monopoly. But who
decides what becomes the next great thing?
Maybe it’s all just determined by the roll of a dice!