by Bruce Whitehill
An editorial published November 2006 in Knucklebones games magazine
It is amazing to think that a board game played in Cairo thousands of years ago is played in places like Rochester, New York today. Games can connect time periods, and they seem to permeate all societies, and have done so for many generations. Like sports, games are played around the planet and they serve both to identify and help define a culture as well as to link disparate worlds together. One of the world’s premiere game inventors, Alex Randolph (featured in this issue) once said, “I do often feel that in all of civilization there is nothing quite as curious and intriguing as a board game.”
By “board game,” he was referring not only to those hard-backed paper marvels that unfold from the recesses of a cardboard box, but basically any games that could be played on the table, including such ubiquitous ones as dominoes, mah jongg, and other tile-laying games.
Games are not just discovered, but often uncovered, the result of serious exploration and scrutiny. The rules to the ancient game of Senet have been decoded from cuneiform tablets by Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum, giving the game a slight boost over its early rivals, Mehen (The Snake Game), Hounds and Jackals, and The Royal Game of Ur. Very early game boards have been discovered in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and India, among other places. Before the commercialization of games, game boards were etched into stone, carved in wood, or drawn on anything that would hold an image. I sometimes imagine fashioning a simple game on a beach of sand, with merely the tip of a finger, watching as my opponent, about to place his final mark for the game’s victory, gasps in disappointment as the tide sweeps away our creation.
But many of the oldest games have survived. Mancala games, such as Wari, are among the most ancient and have traveled from Africa to the rest of the world. Backgammon, from the 1st century, with antecedents even before then, is enjoyed worldwide—search for backgammon on Google and you get over eleven million hits. The classic game of chess gets almost seven times as many hits (more than Monopoly). The origin of chess is still uncertain, so maybe many of the sites are arguing about whether the game began in China or India (moving quickly to Persia and the Arab culture). In any case, the game has progressed over the globe since its beginnings during or before the seventh century. Thai chess, Chinese chess and Japanese chess, still national favorites, have expanded across the seas. And chess using live people is even now played in parts of the world, most notably Marostica, Italy, where it is a biennial event.
Checkers, on the other hand, is new—it started in the 12th century. In the U.S., checkers is identified by its board of eight-by-eight spaces. Frisian checkers is played only in Holland on a 10×10 board, and capturing can be done on horizontal and vertical lines. In parts of Canada and in Sri Lanka, checkers is played on a 12 x 12 board. Checkers—or draughts, as the game is known in Europe and elsewhere—is played on the 8 x 8 boards of Spain and Portugal, and in the Caribbean, some South American countries, and North Africa, and in all these places the game allows the “flying” king to travel multiple spaces along the diagonal. In Turkish checkers (Dama), pieces are placed next to one another on squares of both colors, there are no starting pieces in the first and last row, and pieces can move sideways. And in Duchkov, Russia, in 1998, the “Casanova Open” was held—an international checkers tournament commemorating the 200th anniversary of Casanova’s death.
Games traveled the globe long before most people were able to. Mill, Mühle, Morelles, and Nine Mens’ Morris—all the same game—are played in different languages throughout Europe and the United States. Fox and Geese, which the Icelanders lay claim to, is a world-renowned strategy game for two. Pachisi has migrated from India to the rest of the world (becoming Parcheesi in the U.S. and Ludo in England), Snakes and Ladders (Chutes and Ladders) has given a special international status to that most-feared reptile, and dominoes, a favorite of men at sea, has sparked countless variations globally. The popular European Game of Goose is still Italy’s game, mah jongg is still played in China, and GO, an ancient game from Japan, continues to be a favorite there, though all these games have earned a great following on many continents. Othello, taken from Reversi from the late 1800s and re-created in Japan in 1976, has toured throughout the western world.
Newer games travel to more places as the world shrinks. Scrabble, America’s premiere word game (Jotto was also great but seemed to be limited to a cult following in New York), was spread throughout Europe by Spear & Sons, a company that began in Germany in 1879. The Memory game (Concentration) is a staple put out by another German company, Ravensburger, that has been manufacturing games since 1884. (Spear is gone, but Ravensburger is now one of the premiere manufacturers of games and jigsaw puzzles in the world.) The Dutch are still crazy about their game of Stratego—a game so popular in the U.S. that we think we invented it.
In London, in late August and early September, the annual Mind Sports Olympiad brings together thousands of people from over 60 countries, playing such universal games as Michel Lalet’s and Laurent Levi’s Abalone, Sid Sackson’s Acquire and Alex Randolph’s Twixt, Maureen Hiron’s Continuo, Mordechai (Marco) Meirovitz’s Mastermind, Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan, and Mogensdorf’s Stratego, among many others. The inventors of these games came from, respectively, France, the U.S.A., the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Not every state or country is a hotbed of game playing activity. Switzerland seems to have few players groups, and Italian games author Leo Colovini once said that there are more game designers in Italy than there are players. But whether it’s children scratching tic-tac-toe on a rock or men sitting on some steps in Antigua moving seeds from one pit to another on a hand-made mancala board, or Greek children playing the game of “Knucklebones,” games are played all around the world, and now, more so than ever before in our history, shared by more and more cultures.
