by Bruce Whitehill
An editorial published July 2007 in Knucklebones games magazine
The satirical Roman poet Juvenal once said (in Latin, of course) the Romans “long for two things only: bread and games.” He said it in the first or second century, and was referring to “outdoor” games—you know, like the ones using gladiators as playing pieces. (During these Circus Maximus shows, the organizers used to throw pieces of bread into the crowd.) He couldn’t have meant card games, since probably nobody was making papyrus cards for play at that time (playing cards really weren’t “invented” until the 7th to 10th century, and then they would had to have been shipped over from China). But he could have been talking about board games—after all, they were around at that time, and even twenty to thirty centuries before then.
It’s possible that the first “board” games were played by drawing in the sand at the beach, but, if so, all evidence of that has been washed away. However, there are boards etched in stone or slate that have survived for thousands of years. Ah, I can sense your wonder and anticipate your query already: How can you call a game surface of sand or slate or stone a “board”? Well, the term “board game” possibly dates back to when sheets of paper were pasted onto cardboard. Calling them “cardboard” games was probably a little clumsy. Games historian and author David Parlett thinks the “board” term evolved from the “table” or “plank” that referred to the flat surface on which the game was played. And historian Wayne Saunders points out that backgammon is divided into “tables” and the pieces referred to also as “tablemen.” Ulrich Schaedler, director of the Swiss Museum of Games (Musée Suisse du Jeu) notes the Roman use of “tabula”: “In all the written sources where this word is mentioned in connection with games it can be simply translated ‘game board’ or ‘board game’…. with this word the gaming pieces were meant, not the board.” Now the term “board game” has come to mean the style of game that’s played and not the material it is played on, and “game board” is the surface on which that game is played. Language changes. Is everybody on board with that?
Classic, ancient games such as the Egyptian Senet (Senat) and the Royal Game of Ur, the Roman Latrunculi, or its Greek antecedent, Polis, may have been carved into stone or wood, or crudely drawn on some surface. Traditional mancala games are still played on wood boards in which the cups (holes or troughs) have been carved out (there are enough wood boards still sold—including those made in Africa where the game was said to have originated—that buying a copy in plastic seems almost a sacrilege).
Eventually, gameboards were produced on textiles, through weaving and sewing, and, much later, drawn or even printed on cloth. Linen boards were lightweight, could be easily folded, kept in a pouch, and would lie flat when unfolded. Once the printing process was developed in the U.S. in the mid 1800s, games could be printed on sheets of paper and then pasted onto a cardboard backing. John McLoughlin, in the 1850s, along with his brothers in the following decades, and Milton Bradley, a lithographer, were instrumental in the advancement of these printing processes, leading to the ability to mass-produce games.
The early American gameboards were not put in boxes, but sold along with a small parts box that contained the playing pieces and rules. The earliest boards actually had a parts “pouch” attached to the back of the board. The boards usually consisted of two pieces which were bound or, later, taped together in the middle so the board could be folded. Keep in mind that masking tape wasn’t invented until 1925, and Scotch tape was developed (by the same inventor, Richard Drew) in 1930; the inventor was an engineer for 3M, the chemical and manufacturing company that made a successful move into board games in 1962. It is interesting to note that the size of a gameboard used by Milton Bradley in 1876 (maybe much earlier) is exactly the same size of the standard board still used today. However, there is a wide variety of sizes and styles of gameboards. A one-piece board doesn’t fold and is usually much smaller than a folded board. One-piece boards can sometimes be removed from the box, or they could be a part of the box. In the early 1900s small gameboards were actually part of the bottom of the box—remove the lid and, presto!—there was the gameboard on the bottom with a few wooden playing pieces and a small cardboard spinner thrown in. (The game’s instructions, by the way, would be on a printed sheet of paper, or inside the box lid, or even on the box lid.)
You know how you open a modern game box and there’s often a cardboard filler in there that supports the gameboard? That’s called the build-up, referring to how it builds up and strengthens the box. Actually, it’s to keep consumers from complaining about the cavernous opening that would appear if there was no build-up. In any case, in many games into the mid 1900s the playing surface was printed right onto the build-up, saving the expense of producing a separate gameboard. In rare cases, the gameboard was inside and another actually on the lid of the box! This was done when the product offered different games to be played on more than one board.
Nowadays, gameboards can have multiple folds, usually with one portion of the board split, that is, cut, from the center to the middle of one of the sides. These two-fold boards pack up neatly into “bookshelf” style games. The bookshelf game box, still widespread in Europe, was popularized by 3M company in the 1960s and ‘70s, but goes back to around 1900 when large boards, including backgammon boards, were made of wood or pressed cardboard and included a spine, so that when folded they looked like books, the title of the game appearing as if a book title.
Besides stone, wood, linen, and paper gameboards, there are boards today made of that ubiquitous material, plastic, of course. Most of the plastic boards are three-dimensional, skill-and-action or dexterity games—Mousetrap, a game from 1963, was the first of this type to be a huge hit. At some point, these elaborate set-ups cease to be board games; hence, the playing apparatus is not a gameboard. We’ll save those semantic issues for another time. However, I want to point out that the first 3-D “plastic” gameboards were produced by a small company called Bettye-B in the 1950s, and these were gameboards—three-dimensional boards used to elevate the simple game path and make it more visually appealing. Bettye-B (the “B” stood for CEO Robert “Bob” Whiteman, and the “Bettye” for his wife) produced only eight games in its scant four years of production (1954-57), but was extremely innovative with its use of the first vacuum-form gameboards, using a molding process. The games of Trapped, an Ellery Queen license, Robin Hood, and B.T.O. all used thin plastic vacuum-form gameboards. B.T.O., b.t.w., stood for Big Time Operator, and, I must digress, was a Monopoly-style game in which players “shrewdly manipulate to monopolize…famous New York landmarks”; besides the unique boards, Bettye-B was one of the first companies to license a game from television, Break the Bank (1955).
I know I can’t get away with talking about gameboards without telling you about the smallest and largest of them. The two smallest I know of—not including product premiums and the dollhouse checkerboards and suchlike used for displays only—were wood and were both produced by the Embossing Company in 1929. One, Tit Tat Toe, was slightly smaller than the 3.5” x 3.5” box it came in. (You know, don’t you, that “tit-tat-toe” was an early spelling of tic tac toe?) The other game, Neck and Neck, was a horse race game with a solid wood board 4” x 2”; it came with wood pegs to represent the three horses in the race, and teeny tiny dice.
I have not measured all the large, commercial one-piece and folding game boards, but I suspect some of the “wargaming” boards might vie for the record. But the largest area to be filled by gameboards making up one game came in one box sold by John Wanamaker of the famous Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia. Wanamaker’s, founded in 1861, was one of the first American department stores, and survived until 1995. The game, Substitute Golf, came out in 1906 and had nine boards, each representing one hole in golf, each 10” x 22”. Though the game was played on each board individually, one at a time, and there was no path leading from one board to another, laid out side-by-side the gameboards form the largest commercially marketed game known.
I hope that’s more than you ever expected to learn about game boards in one sitting. And I chose not to enter the philosophical realm of whether “Twister” is a gameboard or not—though I hasten to say it is a play “mat” and the game Twister is not a board game, it is a, uhm, I’ll let you decide.
In any case, I love both board games and game boards. To me, when I hear someone say “room and board,” that means a night’s lodging and a game.
