It's All a Game E-Book

Tristan Donovan

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Board games have been with us longer than even the written word. But what is it about this pastime that continues to captivate us well into the age of smartphones and instant gratification? In It's All a Game renowned games expert Tristan Donovan opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. He traces the evolution of the game across cultures, time periods, and continents, from the paranoid Chicago toy genius behind classics like Operation and Mouse Trap, to the role of Monopoly in helping prisoners of war escape the Nazis, and even the scientific use of board games today to teach artificial intelligence how to reason and how to win. With these compelling stories and characters, Donovan ultimately reveals why board games have captured hearts and minds all over the world for generations.

Leseprobe

Also by Tristan Donovan

Replay: The History of Video Games

Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World

Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle

To my sister Jade,the queen of overturned Monopoly boards

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Birth of a New Gaming Era

1. TOMB RAIDERS AND THE LOST GAMES OF THE ANCIENTS

What board games reveal about our ancestors

2. CHESS: THE ‘MAD QUEEN’S GAME’

How the chessboard came to embody centuries of world history

3. BACKGAMMON: THE FAVOURED GAME OF INTERNATIONAL PACESETTERS AND ANCIENT EMPERORS

How backgammon became the most glamorous game of the seventies

4. THE GAME OF LIFE: A JOURNEY TO THE UNIQUELY AMERICAN DAY OF RECKONING

What The Game of Life tells us about the development of US society

5. THE FORGOTTEN MESSAGE OF MONOPOLY

How Monopoly went from anti-landlord tirade to celebration of cut-throat capitalism

6. FROM KRIEGSSPIEL TO RISK: BLOOD-SOAKED AND WORLD-SHAPING PLAY

How board games prepared the world for war

7. I SPY

How chess and Monopoly became tools of espionage and propaganda

8. CLUEDO’S BILLION-DOLLAR CRIME SPREE

How Cluedo’s very British murders created a world of armchair sleuths

9. SCRABBLE: WORDS WITHOUT MEANING

Why words are meaningless to the best Scrabble players

10. PLASTIC FANTASTIC: MOUSE TRAP, OPERATION AND THE WILLY WONKA OF TOYS

How Mouse Trap and Operation took board games into the plastic age

11. SEX IN A BOX

What board games from Twister to Monogamy tell us about sexual attitudes

12. MIND GAMES: EXPLORING BRAINS WITH BOARD GAMES

What board games reveal about our minds

13. RISE OF THE MACHINES: GAMES THAT TRAIN SYNTHETIC BRAINS

How board games have powered the development of artificial intelligence

14. TRIVIAL PURSUIT: ADULTS AT PLAY

How Trivial Pursuit broke games out of the toy box

15. PANDEMICS AND TERROR: DISSECTING GEOPOLITICS ON CARDBOARD

What board games teach us about disease, geopolitics and the War on Terror

16. MADE IN GERMANY: CATAN AND THE CREATION OF MODERN BOARD GAMES

How Germany revitalized board-gaming for the twenty-first century

References

Acknowledgements

Index

Picture Section

Copyright

List of Illustrations

A Senet board made for the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, circa 1390-1353 BC

The Royal Game of Ur from 2600-2400 BC recovered by Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations in Iraq

I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball at the backgammon table in the 1970s

Egyptian actor and bridge champion Omar Sharif playing backgammon in the early 1980s

Milton Bradley’s debut game: 1860’s The Checkered Game of Life

One hundred years later Bradley’s game is reborn as The Game of Life

The Landlord’s Game, the 1904 protest game by Elizabeth Magie that evolved into Monopoly

Charles Darrow made this 1933 Monopoly set with its circular board by hand

Charles Darrow’s Monopoly sets soon went from circular to square

Londoners having fun on a giant Monopoly board in Trafalgar Square during the 2016 London Games Festival

Toy maestro Marvin Glass, second from left, demonstrating a new invention to executives from the Ideal Toy Company

1963’s Mouse Trap Game gave Marvin Glass & Associates its first big board game hit

Teenagers enjoying a game of Twister in the late 1960s

The romantic board game that’s still too risqué for some high street retailers

A thousand people playing Catan in 2015 at Germany’s Spiel event – the world’s biggest annual board game convention

Games galore at the Draughts board game café in Hackney, London

Introduction

THE BIRTH OF A NEW GAMING ERA

In February 2014 Nick Curci crawled through a hole in the hardboard sealing up a railway arch in East London and discovered his future.

Once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside, he saw a large bare space topped with a ceiling of curved brickwork. It was perfect. This was exactly the kind of place he needed to fulfil his mission to open Draughts, London’s first board-game café. ‘There was nothing in there at all – just an empty old archway – but I thought it was amazing,’ he recalls. ‘It fitted with this retro feeling of being in somewhere cosy with bricks over us.’

Today that Victorian-era archway on Acton Mews in Hackney looks and feels very different. While the exposed brickwork and rumble of passing London Overground trains remains, the entrance is now an expanse of glass, the walls are lined with shelves packed with hundreds of board games and the gloom has been replaced by inviting orange lighting.

It’s an uninspiring Tuesday afternoon in early January when I visit Draughts, the kind of day where the clouds hang so low the city feels like it’s trapped under a duvet and yet there are still a few groups of game players huddled around the tables. ‘This is probably our slowest week in the whole year – it’s the first week when everyone goes back to work,’ says Curci as we grab one of the spare tables. ‘It’s busier in the evenings and we can have up to ninety people, depending on how we arrange the tables.’

Curci says he stumbled rather than planned to get into the board-game café business.

Raised in Marlboro, a hamlet on the Hudson River in New York State just north of Manhattan, Curci used to work in e-commerce helping retailers with their digital strategies. His work brought him to London in 2011 and soon after he had his first encounter with the new wave of board games that have been reviving interest in tabletop play in recent years. One of those he tried was Pandemic, a game where players work together to fight global disease outbreaks. ‘I found it to be a novelty as a cooperative game,’ he says. ‘It’s a completely foreign concept to the games we knew about growing up, like Sorry!, Game of Life or Monopoly.’

Things snowballed from there. He told his childhood friend Jason Chung, who was still in the US, about the new games he had discovered and the pair began thinking that maybe board games could be the basis for the business they had always talked about starting together while growing up in Marlboro. ‘I had this idea that maybe there was something in board games because it seemed like a growing industry with all the new games coming out,’ Curci says. ‘Jason then discovered that these board-game cafés existed but there wasn’t one in London.’

One of the North American cafés that caught their eye was Snakes & Lattes, which opened in Toronto in August 2010. Snakes & Lattes is sometimes called North America’s first board-game café but others such as the Haunted Game Café in Fort Collins, Colorado, predate it.

The true birthplace of the dedicated board-game café seems to be South Korea. By 2004 the Korean capital Seoul already had around 130 cafés renting out games and tables by the hour. Other East Asian countries followed suit and by 2012 there were around 200 game cafés in Beijing, and Singapore’s The Mind Cafe had gone international thanks to the addition of an outlet in New Delhi.

While Snakes & Lattes was not the first, it was the board-game café that caught the imagination of the media and board-game fans in the west. So much so that in September 2015 the Canadian TV channel Fibe TV1 began broadcasting a sitcom about the café’s early days called Snakes & Lattes: The Show. Soon, board-game cafés were sprouting up in cities throughout North America and in August 2012 the idea crossed the Atlantic when the Game Hub in Edinburgh opened its doors for the first time.

Today, board-game cafés can be found all over the world, from San Francisco to New York, Sydney to Tokyo and Paris to Berlin – as well as cities like Belfast, Brighton, Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Nottingham and Oxford in the UK.

Most board-game cafés have the same core business model and Draughts, which opened in November 2014, is no different. At Draughts, players pay £5 per person and then get to pick games from a collection that boasts nearly 800 options, which cover the gamut of board-gaming. There are ancient perennials like chess, traditional favourites such as Cluedo, emerging classics like Ticket to Ride and the latest flavour of the month among those who hang out online at websites like BoardGameGeek.

After paying the fee there’s little pressure to hurry – just the temptation of craft beers on tap, hot coffees and tasty snacks. Draughts also holds regular special events, including game-design workshops with professional game-makers, and offers themed cocktails such as the Galaxy Trucker – an espresso, chocolate-and-coffee liqueur, Baileys and whipped cream concoction, inspired by the board game of the same name.

While Draughts is all about games, its clientele is not limited to board-game devotees. ‘We get a good mix of people,’ says Curci. ‘During the school breaks there’s a lot of families in the day. After 6 p.m. we usually have young professionals. We also get a lot of couples on dates – a lot of people tell us, “We had our first date here.” We see ourselves a lot like a modern cinema experience where a film geek could see an artsy film or an action buff could find something for them.’

To that end, Draughts prefers to hire staff with hospitality experience and teach them about the games rather than recruiting committed board-gamers, whose niche tastes can often clash with what the average customer might want to play. ‘We used to have this Monopoly question as part of our interviewing process,’ says Curci. ‘We would do this role play where I play the customer and I come in and say I’d like to play Monopoly to see how they responded to that. We had some terrible responses like, “Oh god, you don’t want to play Monopoly. Monopoly is terrible,” and “We don’t have Monopoly.” The right response in our opinion is something along the lines of, “Great, we have seven different versions of Monopoly and if you have fun playing that and are interested I could show you similar types of games.” We want to be inclusive of everyone. We don’t want to scare people who just want to come in and play Hungry Hungry Hippos or Monopoly.’

With Shoreditch and Hoxton just down the road, it’s easy to file Draughts in the same drawer as cat cafés, breakfast-cereal emporiums and pop-up avocado-brunch bars, but there is more to the board-game café movement than hipster flights of fancy – as evidenced by the rising sales of board games since 2013. Market watchers NPD Group reported that board-game sales in the UK grew 24 per cent in the twelve months to June 2017 and Britain is no isolated case. Worldwide, the sales of board games have swollen from around £5.6 billion in 2011 to about £7 billion in 2016, according to market intelligence firm Euromonitor.

Curci thinks there are multiple reasons behind the board-game comeback, including nostalgia, the widening choice and improving quality of the games together with something of a pushback against the grip social media and smartphones increasingly have on our lives. ‘We like to focus on getting people away from the digital world and reconnecting with each other over a board game,’ says Curci. ‘We love the idea of people taking photos and posting it on Instagram and all that, but we’re one of the few places that when we’re busy you don’t see anybody on their phones. I’m looking around the café right now and there’s not one person on their phone. People are open to the idea of a place where they can go and they don’t need to be connected on their phone and if they are they are probably ruining the experience for the person they are with. And even if they don’t have good conversation the board game makes up for that.’

It is that ability to bring people together face-to-face that is helping board games endure in an age of PlayStations, Facebook and iPhones. People first began playing board games centuries, maybe even millennia, before the development of the written word and they have been with us ever since. Chess is a game so old that it was invented around the same time as matches and the concept of toilet paper, but we’re still playing it even after the invention of the printing press, record players, films, radios, televisions, video games and the Internet.

Rather than being cast aside, board games have become cemented in our traditions. Today, board games are as much a feature of a British Christmas as turkey, cracker jokes and the sound of Slade’s Noddy Holder yelling ‘It’s Chrissstmaaas!’.

As a nation we gather around the cardboard more than 100 million times every Yuletide – equivalent to two games each. And, as is tradition, half of those games end in a bust-up as we accuse each other of stealing from the bank and fall out over the Free Parking rule in Monopoly.

Instead of dying out in our increasingly digitized age, board games are thriving. But board games have done more than just survive. They have made and ruined fortunes, revealed the secrets of lost civilizations and concealed the work of spies. They have tested morals, saved marriages, exposed the inner workings of our minds, tracked societal changes and organized the deaths of millions. And – above all else – they have brought us together and entertained us.

This book is the story of these board games. The games that shaped us, the games that explained us and the games that moulded the world we live in.

TOMB RAIDERS AND THE LOST GAMES OF THE ANCIENTS

What board games reveal about our ancestors

‘At last have made a wonderful discovery in Valley,’ read the telegram. ‘A magnificent tomb with seals intact; recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations.’

A shiver of excitement shot through Lord Carnarvon’s body. This was it, the message he had been waiting years for. It had been so long since he agreed to fund archaeologist Howard Carter’s search that he had almost given up hope. After digesting the news, Lord Carnarvon ordered his servants to pack his cases. It was 5 November 1922, and Carter had just discovered the lost tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen.

What awaited Lord Carnarvon in the pale sands of the Valley of the Kings was the greatest haul of Egyptian artefacts ever found. Grave robbers had ransacked most of the royal tombs millennia before, but Tutankhamen’s burial chambers had barely been touched.

Carter and his team spent the next eight years clearing the site. For months workers scuttled in and out of the tomb like ants, carrying relic after relic to the surface on canvas stretchers. Pots, shields, walking canes, stools and fruit baskets mingled with beds of gilded wood, finely decorated chests and thrones covered in precious stones and coloured glass.

Among the treasures were four game boards. Some were plain and easily overlooked amid this archaeological bounty, but one stood out. The board sat on the upper surface of an oblong box that was held aloft by feline legs carved out of ebony. Paws at the bottom of the legs rested on short golden drums attached to two sledge runners. The ivory veneer game board was divided into three rows of ten squares by a lattice of wooden strips, and at the front of the box was a drawer containing playing pieces and the short, flat throwing sticks that acted as the game’s dice.

While the board uncovered in Tutankhamen’s tomb was exceptionally ornate, Carter and his fellow Egyptologists had encountered this game before. They called it ‘The Game of Thirty Squares’, and it had been turning up in digs ever since explorers began excavating the ruins of ancient Egypt around the dawn of the nineteenth century.

The earliest confirmed set uncovered by archaeologists dates back to 3000 BC, around the same time that ancient Egypt was founded, but fragments of what appear to be the game’s board have also been found in burial sites predating the kingdom’s creation by centuries – discoveries that suggested the game could be as old as writing itself. Equally impressive, other excavations had found that the game was still being played when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt more than 3000 years after those first boards were made.

The game’s presence in the ruins of ancient Egypt did not end with boards covered with centuries of dust. In many of their digs Egyptologists also discovered paintings of people playing the game on tomb walls. One such painting in Meir showed two players boasting to each other about how they would win the game. Some things, it seems, never change.

Even beyond the tombs the game lurked, its board scratched onto temple floors and carved into the wood of a quay on the River Nile. It also appeared in a satirical papyrus found in the ruins of Deir el-Medina, the ancient village that housed the workers who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the comic book-like papyrus a randy lion defeats a gazelle at the game and claims the chance to bed the antelope as his prize.

But some finds hinted at something stranger, something darker, about this game. In the tomb of Nefertari, the wife of Ramesses II, a painting showed the queen playing alone against an invisible opponent. The game also featured in the Book of the Dead created for the Theban scribe Ani around 1250 BC. In the book Ani and his wife are shown playing the game together as their bird-bodied spirits stand upon their sarcophagi.

Clearly there was something odd about this ancient game but for all the finds it remained shrouded in mystery. It resembled no game played in modern times, and for all their searching archaeologists found no record of the rules.

The tomb paintings revealed little. The side-on viewpoints of ancient Egyptian art obscured the position of pieces on the board making it impossible to decode the game from the images. The only secret the paintings gave away was that the ancient Egyptians called the game ‘Senet’, which meant ‘passing’.

The variety of boards added to the confusion. Half had all-blank squares but the rest had hieroglyphs on the five squares at the bottom-right of the board. Some boards had even more hieroglyphs; on one set every space was decorated. The playing pieces varied too. Some were cones, others were shaped like chess pawns and cotton spools.

With the rules unknown, Egyptologists could only speculate about the nature of the game, but it was challenging even to reach a verdict on which square was the starting space. Some believed the game began at the bottom-right corner because the hieroglyph seen in that space on some boards meant ‘door’. Others countered that this symbol also meant ‘exit’ and argued that this space marked not the beginning but the end of the game.

The riddle of Senet proved so vexing that in 1946 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York resorted to calling in George Parker, the founder of leading game manufacturer Parker Brothers. After examining the game and consulting with the museum’s Egyptologists, Parker proposed a set of rules that he later used for a commercial version of Senet. But his ideas were no more convincing than anyone else’s. It was all just guesswork; modern ideas superimposed on ancient relics.

But as more and more Senet boards piled up in museums across the world, a pattern emerged. The oldest boards tended to have blank squares but the most recent were decorated with religious hieroglyphs. Could it be that Senet started as a game but later became an object of faith? The paintings of the game supported this idea. Early artwork showed the game as part of daily life but later pieces pictured Senet in rituals and burials. Based on this and other evidence, the Egyptologist Peter Piccione proposed that over the centuries, Senet morphed from a game into a playable guide to the afterlife.

The ancient Egyptians believed that when people died their souls would gather on the barge of the sun god Ra at sunset and then be taken on a night-time journey through the underworld. Along the way the souls of sinners would be punished and destroyed while the spirits that remained on the barge at sunrise would unite with Ra and live forever. Piccione argued that the hieroglyphs on the later Senet boards represented key moments on this journey of souls.

The top-left corner square of these later boards bore the symbol of Thoth, the ibis-headed deity who announced the arrival of the newly deceased in the Underworld, and so this was where the game began. In the middle row of the board were squares representing Osiris, the green-skinned judge of souls who would send the guilty to be obliterated in flames, and the House of Netting where the impure would be entangled in nets and tortured. The last five squares on the board included the House of Rejuvenation, the mummification workshop where bodies were prepared for burial and eternal life, and the Waters of Chaos in which sinful souls would drown. The final space represented Re-Horakhty, the god of the rising sun, and signified the moment when worthy souls would join Ra for eternity.

In this interpretation Senet was no mere game but a gateway to the spirit realm. Through ritualistic playing of the game the living could learn what awaited them in the afterlife, and if fiery annihilation were to be their fate they could then change their ways. The evidence collected by Piccione also suggested that the game’s powers didn’t stop there. Senet also acted like a Bronze Age Ouija board that allowed people to connect with the dead. They could even play Senet against their own souls, which would explain that strange painting of Queen Nefertari playing solo.

Ancient Egyptians were not alone in using games for fortune-telling. In the same year that Carter discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb, another British archaeologist named Leonard Woolley began excavating the ruins of Ur in southern Iraq.

Founded circa 4000 BC, Ur became one of the richest and most populated cities of the ancient world. But its glory days did not last. Nomadic invaders sacked the city. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers that had made Ur rich deposited enough silt to shift the coastline further and further from the city. War and drought followed, causing citizens to head for more fertile and secure lands. By the end of the sixth century the once-great city of Ur was empty and slowly being buried by the shifting sands.

During his excavations of the city’s royal cemetery, Woolley uncovered a game that became known as ‘the Royal Game of Ur’, although other boards were later found across the Middle East. The game found in Ur had once belonged to a princess. Its squares were made from shell plaques inlaid into a wooden block and separated by intense blue strips of the precious gemstone lapis lazuli. Each square was decorated with intricate patterns: eyes, rosettes and geometric motifs coloured with red limestone and even more lapis lazuli.

The board was distinctive, its shape reminiscent of an unevenly loaded dumbbell. The left side had an area four squares wide and three squares deep, which was connected in the middle by a two-square bridge to the right side, which measured two spaces wide and three spaces deep.

Like Senet, the Royal Game of Ur was a game of the dead. It had fallen out of favour hundreds of years before Woolley found the princess’s board, and its rules were unknown. For decades it seemed as if the rules of the Royal Game of Ur would remain a mystery, too, but then in the early eighties Irving Finkel of the British Museum decided to inspect a near-forgotten tablet lurking deep within the London museum’s vast archive of ancient relics.

The tablet’s journey to London began in 177 BC, when the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu took a slab of moist clay and a blunt reed and began etching words into it using cuneiform signs – the earliest known form of writing. At the time the city of Babylon was in serious decline; citizens were fleeing en masse to escape the constant battles for its control that had started after the death of Alexander the Great and, in the chaos, the scribe’s tablet ended up lost in the sand-covered ruins of what used to be the world’s largest city.

The tablet remained buried there until a team of European archaeologists rescued it from the dirt in 1880 and sold it to the British Museum, which catalogued it and then filed it away. And there the tablet sat largely ignored for yet another century until Finkel, the museum’s cuneiform expert, finally got around to looking at it.

After taking it out of storage Finkel – a man who could easily pass for Professor Dumbledore thanks to his grand white beard and thin-framed spectacles – turned over the tablet and saw a pattern that resembled the distinctive board of the Royal Game of Ur. His curiosity aroused, he began translating the ancient script and, to his delight, discovered that it explained how to play the game.

The Royal Game of Ur was a race game. Players competed to get their pieces from the left-hand side of the board to the exit square on the right-hand side by rolling dice made from sheep anklebones. But as well as being an amusement, the game also told players their fortune. Each of the board’s squares carried a vague prediction that wouldn’t seem out of place in a fortune cookie or newspaper astrologist’s column. ‘You will find a friend’, offered one space. Others promised that players would become ‘powerful like a lion’ or get to drink ‘fine beer’.

Using games for spiritual guidance or to learn about the future might strike us as strange today, but it makes more sense when we understand that our brains have a serious aversion to the concept of randomness. We subconsciously look for patterns in the world around us and instinctively try to identify the causes behind those patterns. It’s an immensely useful ability. If we’re hiking in the woods and hear an unexpected rustle in the bushes we are more likely to imagine a bear caused it than a random gust of wind. That interpretation will almost always be wrong but mistaking a breeze for a bear is no big deal, while mistaking a bear for the wind is a big deal. Our brains’ habit of formulating connections between events not only aids survival but also helps us develop theories and ideas we can put to the test, paving the way for new discoveries and insights.

Useful as this clearly is, our subconscious connecting of the dots also causes us to attribute non-existent meaning to random events. Even today, some 500 years since the mathematical theory of probability was developed, our minds still rebel against randomness. We might feel the dice are working against us during a game, imagine a secret conspiracy caused a tragic accident or conclude a homeopathic remedy cured our cold.

The ‘Madden Curse’ is a good example of how our minds impose meaning on randomness. Some American football fans believe there is a jinx on players who appear on the cover of the annual Madden NFL video game. After all, many of the NFL stars who graced the game’s cover were then injured or underperformed that season. Some believe the curse is real enough to even campaign against their favourite players being made Madden NFL cover stars.

Of course there is no connection. American football is a rough game and injuries are commonplace. Take any random group of NFL players and you will probably find a good chunk of them were injured or performed below par in any given season, regardless of whether they appeared on the cover of Madden NFL that year. But because of the way our minds work, people imagine a cause-and-effect relationship, and every time a Madden NFL cover star gets hurt it reinforces the belief in the curse.

So if we are still creating bogus connections about unrelated events today it shouldn’t be surprising that ancient people believed there was more to the results of their dice rolls and stick throws than mere chance. Instead of seeing randomness, people saw the invisible hand of the spiritual realm. Landing on the Waters of Chaos in Senet was no random event but a message from a god, a ghost or even your own soul.

Yet, for all the mysticism surrounding them, neither Senet nor the Royal Game of Ur endured. In the case of Senet, religion was probably its undoing. Under Roman rule the Egyptians converted to Christianity and so the game was cast aside like the old gods. The fate of the Royal Game of Ur is fuzzier. Some believe it evolved into backgammon. An alternative theory is that early forms of backgammon drew players away from the Royal Game of Ur until it was forgotten. Or at least until everyone thought it had been forgotten.

For while the Royal Game of Ur died out in the Middle East, it lingered on unnoticed in the southern Indian city of Kochi. Sometime before the Middle East lost interest in the game, a group of Jewish merchants left the region and began an epic 5000-mile journey that eventually ended with them settling in Kochi. One of the things those adventurous traders took on their travels was the Royal Game of Ur, and their descendants were still playing a recognizable version of it when they began migrating to Israel after the Second World War, many hundreds of years after people stopped playing it in the Middle East.

The Royal Game of Ur is not the only board game that allows us to trace the footsteps of our ancestors and few games do this better than the mancala games of Africa, the Middle East and southern Asia. Although widespread around the world, mancala games are less well-known in Western countries, where they are sometimes portrayed as a single game, even though that’s like calling ‘playing cards’ a game. There are hundreds of different mancala games but what they all have in common is that they are two-player games in which people move playing pieces around a board of pit-like holes.

The most widespread mancala game is Oware, which is also known as Awari, Awélé and Warri, among many other names. Oware boards consist of two rows of six pits. Each player owns the row nearest to him or her. The game starts with each pit filled with four counters or ‘seeds’ that traditionally consisted of shells, nuts or small pebbles. The aim is to capture the majority of these seeds.

On his turn, each player chooses a hole on his side of the board, scoops up all the seeds inside and then moves anticlockwise around the board, dropping one seed into each hole until his hand is empty. This process is known as ‘sowing’. If the last seed sowed brings the number of seeds in a rival’s hole to two or three, the player captures, or ‘harvests’, all the seeds in that hole. And if the hole he sowed before it also has two or three seeds, he gets to harvest those seeds too, a process that continues until the player reaches the end of his opponent’s row or encounters a hole that does not contain two or three seeds. The key to success is to sow seeds so that you harvest as many seeds as possible while limiting your opponent’s ability to claim seeds from your side of the board.

Oware is straightforward but other mancala games are notoriously complex. One of these headache-inducing mancala games is Bao, which is mainly played in East Africa. Bao’s board features four rows of eight pits and comes with an intimidating list of rules that dictate the various ways to win, how the direction of sowing changes depending on the stage of the game and how harvested seeds are to be redistributed on the board. Under certain conditions players must start to sow again from the hole they dropped their last seed into and, in theory, this chain reaction of sowing can be never-ending.

In between the simplicity of Oware and the complexity of Bao are hundreds of strains of mancala, from the three-row boards of Ethiopia and Eritrea to the twenty-four-hole version played by Roma travellers in Transylvania. And the distribution of these variants provides a breadcrumb trail of human migration and communication over the centuries.

The starkest evidence of this can be seen in how mancala games spread along slave trade routes. Oware, for example, came with the slaves taken from West Africa to the Caribbean, where they recreated the game’s board in the soil. Much the same happened in East Africa under Omani rule in the seventeenth century. The slaves taken by the Omanis from Mozambique to Muscat brought with them a four-rowed mancala game called Njomba that they played in their homelands. Njomba spread from the slaves to the Omanis, who call it Hawalis and still play it today. The Omanis also sold slaves to French colonists in the Seychelles, which led to Njomba taking root there under the name ‘Makonn’.

But the breadcrumb trail of mancala games is a patchy one. People often played mancala games on makeshift boards scooped out of the earth or on wooden boards that rotted away. The generic nature of the seeds used in the game also makes it difficult to accurately trace the game’s past.

The slippery archaeological record of the mancala games leaves much unanswered. We don’t know if Africa or the Middle East was their birthplace, or when the first games originated; we can only narrow it down to some time between 3000 and 1000 BC. Nor do we know how the evolutionary tree of mancala games fits together; it could be that simpler games like Oware came first and then grew into more complex creations like Bao, but for all we know mancala games were dumbed down over time.

There is one much more recent board game whose evolution and spread around the world is far better documented. A game that is still being played today. A game moulded by centuries of migration, war, trade, technological development and cultural change. And that game is chess.

CHESS: THE ‘MAD QUEEN’S GAME’

How the chessboard came to embody centuries of world history

It’s doubtful that many who frequent the Draughts board-game café today have ever heard of the Gupta Empire, but every one of them will have heard of the game that emerged out of this nearly forgotten Indian realm.

In the fourth century the Guptas ruled the lands around Pataliputra, a settlement near the present-day city of Patna in northeastern India. It was an unremarkable realm, just one of the hundreds of minor-league kingdoms that governed the Indian subcontinent at the time. But the Guptas were destined for greatness.

In 319 AD the ambitious Chandragupta I became the kingdom’s raja (king) and everything changed. Chandragupta I wanted more than the small realm he had inherited, so he ordered his regiments of foot soldiers, chain mail-clad horsemen and fearsome war elephants to build him an empire. Many local rulers took one look at his powerful military forces and surrendered without a fight. Those who resisted were soon crushed.

By the end of the century, the Guptas controlled most of India. Their empire stretched all the way from Balkh in Afghanistan to the mighty Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh. Its northern frontier snaked along the foothills of the Himalayas and in the south its lands extended down to Mumbai on the subcontinent’s western coast and the Krishna River in the east.

To maintain this vast empire, the Guptas built an enormous army boasting more than half a million soldiers and a navy of more than a thousand ships. Yet the Guptas were anything but oppressive despots, for as they expanded their territory they ushered in one of the greatest golden ages in human history.

Under the Guptas, India flourished. Doctors developed new surgical techniques. The streets hummed to the sound of the latest musical instruments. Art, poetry and literature blossomed. There were huge advances in people’s understanding of how to separate metals from their ore and the Gupta rajas used their immense wealth to build schools, hospitals and orphanages.

The empire’s astronomers examined the stars and figured out that the earth spins on its axis and rotates around the sun – centuries before the rest of the world reached the same conclusion. Most significantly of all, the empire developed decimal mathematics and the concept of zero. And, before it disintegrated in the sixth century due to inept rule and foreign attacks, the Gupta Empire gave the world chess.

Chess evolved out of an ancient Indian board game called Ashtāpada. Players rolled the dice and hoped to be the first to get their playing pieces to complete a circuit of the board, which consisted of sixty-four squares arranged into eight rows and eight columns.

Some time in the fifth century, however, people began using the Ashtāpada board for a new four-player game called Chaturanga, which means ‘four limbs’ in Sanskrit. Chaturanga was a war game and the playing pieces represented the four divisions of the Gupta Empire’s impressive military: infantry, horsemen, war elephants and ships. Each player also had a piece that represented the raja who commanded their given force.

The infantry moved like chess pawns, always marching forwards and capturing diagonally. The horsemen leaped around in the same distinctive L-shapes of chess knights and the war elephants charged vertically and horizontally along the board like rooks. And, just like the king in chess, the raja could move one square in any direction.

The ships, however, were unlike anything from chess as we know it today. They moved two squares diagonally in any direction and could also hop over any piece that blocked their path.

With its varied playing pieces, Chaturanga must have struck people as something special. At the time, tokens in other games usually stood for the player on the board, but Chaturanga’s miniature recreation of the Gupta military represented not the player but the army the players controlled. In Chaturanga the players were gods and even the raja followed their orders.

Despite similarities to chess as played today, Chaturanga was a very different game. For starters, there were four armies and the expectation was that players would work with an ally to defeat the other two players before turning on each other. There were also restrictions on how pieces captured each other that echoed India’s caste system. Lowly infantry were barred from taking higher-ranking pieces and rajas could never be killed, only taken captive. Players who captured an enemy raja could even do prisoner swaps to get their rajas back in the game. Another big difference between chess and Chaturanga was luck. Unlike modern chess, Chaturanga was not a game of pure logic. Instead, players flung dice-like throwing sticks into the air to find out which piece they could move. Chaturanga was also usually played for stakes. There were even wild tales of players betting their fingers on the game and only walking away from the board once they had no more digits left to offer.

For the religious, Chaturanga’s status as a gambling game was a problem. The Hindu legal text The Laws of Manu opposed playing games with dice, and while its rules were treated as ideals to live by rather than laws to be enforced, it did deter the devout from playing. The Buddhists were more disapproving still and urged their followers to refrain from even learning the game. Under religious pressure, people got rid of the game’s dice and gave the choice of which piece to move to the players.

Over the years more refinements followed. The war elephants and ships swapped their movement patterns and, most significantly of all, Chaturanga became a two-player game. This last shift saw the once-allied armies of the original version unite into a single sixteen-piece force. To avoid having two rajas per army, one was demoted to a minister, an advisor to the raja who was also limited to moving one square diagonally. And with only two rajas in play, the prisoner swaps no longer made sense, but since killing rajas was frowned upon Chaturanga became a game about trapping – checkmating – the opposing ship.

Merchants soon began taking this incarnation of Chaturanga with them on their travels along the silk roads, which provided not only a means for transporting goods but also for transporting games and ideas. One of the first places the traders took this novelty was Persia. The Persians loved the game – so much so that they even created a legend about its arrival.

The story begins with an Indian ambassador arriving at the court of Khosrow I, who ruled Persia’s Sasanian Empire from 531 to 579 AD. On meeting the Persian shah, the ambassador gave him a beautiful game board and a set of playing pieces fashioned from emeralds and rubies. As Khosrow I admired the elaborate set, the ambassador issued a challenge on behalf of his king.

‘If your wise men cannot figure out how to play this game it will show Persia is intellectually inferior and so we will demand tribute and gold,’ he said. ‘But if your men do solve the riddle of this game then my king will acknowledge you as a deserving ruler.’

The wise men of Persia spent three days examining the unfamiliar game until one declared that he had discovered how to play it. After the sage had defeated the ambassador twelve times in a row, the Indians acknowledged Khosrow I as the rightful ruler of Persia.

The Persians not only keenly embraced the game they called ‘Shatrang’, they also improved it, introducing fixed starting positions for the playing pieces and changing the rajas into shahs. The Persians also began warning each other whenever they threatened their opponent’s shah and concluding games by declaring ‘shat mat’ – ‘the king is defeated’. These practices endure today as ‘check’ and ‘checkmate’. The Indian minister became a farzin, the personal bodyguard of the shah, and since the Persians lacked a significant navy the ships were replaced with rokhs, meaning ‘war chariots’, even though armies had not used such vehicles for centuries.

In short, the Persians adapted the Indian game to mirror their own society, and it wasn’t long after the game’s arrival in Persia before it would be altered yet again.

In the early seventh century the Sasanian court became embroiled in more intrigue and bloodshed than a Game of Thrones box set. Would-be rulers executed their brothers, suffocated a queen with a pillow in her bed, started civil wars, died of plague and slaughtered an eight-year-old king in their pursuit of power. While the Sasanians were busy stabbing each other in the back, the followers of a new religion called Islam were busy preparing to invade Persia. Having finished their conquest of Arabia, the Muslim armies surged into Persia in 636 AD and, aided by the turmoil within the Sasanian court, conquered the whole empire in a mere fourteen years.

Just as trade had brought chess to Persia, so the invasion led to its spread throughout the Arab world as the victorious Muslim armies took the Persian game back home. Chess became a favourite of caliphs and scholars but in this theocratic empire it was inevitable that the burning question of whether Allah approved soon arose. The Koran warned against playing for lots but was chess a gambling game? Not always, but often enough to raise suspicion among the pious. Others fretted that chess was so absorbing it would distract people from their religious duties.

Chess had its supporters, though. Many thought it was just a game and even the caliphate’s ruler Umar ibn al-Khattab, who ordered the invasion of Persia, defended it by declaring: ‘There is nothing wrong in it. It has to do with war.’

The debate didn’t stop with the act of playing chess; the game pieces themselves were another bone of religious contention. The Persians, like the Indians before them, used playing pieces that resembled the military units they were meant to be, but the Islamic Caliphate opposed the creation of images of humans and animals.

Eventually a consensus was reached: chess could be played in private so long as it wasn’t for stakes and the playing pieces did not mimic living things. As a result, the game’s figurines morphed into abstract shapes – rectangular blocks, tall cylinders and curved cones – that had to be distinguished by height and shape alone. Once more, chess had evolved to reflect the society in which it had arrived, changing like a chameleon to fit in with its surroundings.

Not that these alterations ended Islam’s arguments about chess. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 chess was banned, only to be unbanned in 1988. When the Taliban seized control of much of Afghanistan in the nineties, they also outlawed the game and began arresting anyone caught playing it. And in 2014, when Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric, the Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz Al ash-Sheikh, was asked for his opinion on chess on his weekly TV show With His Eminence the Mufti, he declared it forbidden.

After travelling through a mix of trade and war from India to Arabia, chess finally reached Europe in 711 AD when a Muslim army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, landed in Spain, and set about conquering the Iberian Peninsula. Within nine years the invaders had taken control of most of Iberia, which they declared was now the Emirate of Al-Andalus. The Islamic invasion terrified Europe, striking at its identity as a Christian continent, and for the next 700 years European armies fought back, eroding away the emirate until it was no more.

The arrival of Muslim power in Europe did more than provoke shock and war, however. It also led to a period of cultural exchange between the Islamic and Christian worlds. In the process Europeans were reacquainted with the writings of the Greeks and Romans, introduced to new mathematical concepts – and taught how to play chess.

Europe took to chess with zeal. It was in France by 760 AD and being played by Swiss monks before the end of the tenth century. By 1050 AD the game was in southern Germany and before the twelfth century was over it had reached Scandinavia and the remote Isle of Lewis off the coast of Scotland.

As it travelled through Europe, chess wove itself into the daily lives of the nobility. Pages who aspired to become knights had to learn the game and chess masters joined jesters and musicians as entertainers of royal courts.

Chess also became a game of love. The medieval practice of having noble women constantly accompanied by chaperones meant there were few opportunities for courting couples to get some privacy, but it was acceptable for men to visit women in their chambers alone in order to play chess. Unsurprisingly, this made chess very popular with unmarried couples and the game featured heavily in the romantic poetry of the time, including in some versions of Tristan and Iseult, where the Cornish knight and the Irish princess fall in love while playing the game.

Unlike Islam’s religious leaders, the Catholic church saw the divine on the chessboard. One religious treatise on morality, attributed to Pope Innocent III but probably not written by him, said: ‘The condition of the game is, that one piece takes another; and when the game is finished, they are all deposited together, like man in the same place. Neither is there any difference between the king and the poor pawn: for it often happens that when the pieces are thrown promiscuously into the bag, the king lies at the bottom; as some of the greats will find themselves after their transit from this world to the next.’

The Dominican monk Jacobus de Cessolis continued the theme in what became one of medieval Europe’s bestselling books, The Book of the Morals of Men and the Duties of Nobles and Commoners – or, On the Game of Chess. In the book the northern-Italian monk depicts chess as a model of feudal society with all people, from the highest king to the lowest peasant, represented. Each person, he argued, must know their place and adhere to the restrictions of that rank, just as each chess piece is bound by the rules of the game.

Despite being united in its love of chess, Europe couldn’t agree on how to play it. Every kingdom seemed to have its own take on the game. In Germany some pawns could move two squares on their first move instead of the usual one. In northern Italy the king could leap over pieces on his first move. In England players could choose between a short and a long version of the game, each with different starting positions for the pieces.

Even the identity of the playing pieces was contested. Since Europeans were unfamiliar with elephants, people decided to change this unit to something else, but what it became depended on where you lived. In France the elephant became le fou – the fool or jester. The Germans disagreed and declared that the elephant should become a messenger. ‘No, no,’ countered the Italians, ‘it’s a standard-bearer.’ ‘In fact, you’re all wrong,’ interjected the English, ‘because it clearly should be a bishop.’

But by the late 1300s, there was one thing on which all Europeans agreed: that chess could be, well, a bit tedious. The core of the game had barely altered since the days when the Sasanian Empire ruled Persia, and for all its merits chess was a slow, plodding game. Armies would crawl slowly towards the middle of the board as if marching through mud. Chess was so slow that in the Middle East people would save time by making multiple moves on their first go so that they didn’t have to endure the grind of getting armies close enough to actually attack each other.

The Europeans wanted more action, more speed and more aggression. And since chess was a folk game – something passed down through the generations – and owned by nobody at all, just like traditional songs, people began trying to ‘fix’ it. Some enlarged the board, but that only made playing the game take even longer. Others rearranged the starting locations of each piece in the hope that would help. It didn’t. In the Spanish kingdom of Castile, players unknowingly took chess back to its roots by letting dice decide what piece a player could move. For a while dice chess, which was both faster and easier to play, thrived, but the randomness robbed the game of its strategic depth. And once the novelty wore off, the dice joined the elephants, shahs and ships on the scrapheap of chess for a second time.

Europe’s chess experiments also led to the creation of chequered boards that made it easier to follow the game and, around 1100 AD, someone in southern France repurposed the disc-like counters from backgammon and a chessboard to invent a new game that after several centuries of refinement became draughts.

The eureka moment in Europe’s quest to jazz up chess came when people homed in on the idea of making the playing pieces more powerful. In hindsight this solution is obvious: if a playing piece moves too slowly around the board, why not let that piece move faster?

So the bishop or fool (or whatever that piece happened to be) lost its ability to hop over opponents but could now travel any distance diagonally. The pawns got an upgrade too. The two-square opening moves played in Germany became the norm and, as a countermeasure, the ‘en passant’ rule was introduced. En passant, which is French for ‘in passing’, is a special capture move for pawns that only applies under certain conditions. Let’s say the white player moves a pawn for the first time and moves it two squares so that it is adjacent to a black pawn. The black player can then, on her next go only, capture the white pawn using en passant by moving her pawn one square diagonally so that it is directly behind the white pawn.

The most radical change of all, however, was the rise of the queen as the most powerful piece on the chessboard. When chess first came to Europe, it inherited the Arabian vizier piece that was still, beneath it all, the same puny advisor to the raja conceived in India and limited to moving just one space diagonally. Much like the elephant, the concept of viziers didn’t resonate in Europe, so people called it the queen. But this was just a change of name; the moves remained the same.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the queen morphed into the most powerful unit on the board, able to move any number of squares in any direction. The empowerment of the queen was not just about adding action to the game, it also reflected how female leaders were taking charge in kingdoms across Europe and showing they could rule as well as any man.

Leading the new wave of female rulers was Isabella I of Castile, who ruled alongside her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon as an equal partner. Together the couple united Spain, began building an empire in the New World, founded the Spanish Inquisition and in 1492 conquered Granada, the last fragment of Muslim territory in Iberia.

While Isabella I was transforming Spain, another bold woman was making waves in Italy. Caterina Sforza believed her husband, the Count of Forlì, lacked what it took to rule a kingdom, and so she took matters into her own hands. Knowing that the death of Pope Sixtus IV in 1484 could lead to a new pope who would strip her family of their territory, Sforza went on the offensive. Despite being seven months’ pregnant, she mounted her horse and thundered towards Rome at high speed. On completing the ten-mile gallop, she occupied the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo and refused to give it back until the new pope had guaranteed her family’s land and title. She got want she wanted.

Yet some people still didn’t get the message that Sforza was not a woman to be messed with. In 1488 a band of conspirators murdered her husband and took Sforza and her children prisoner. The rebels then demanded that she order Forlì’s garrison to surrender. She persuaded her none-too-bright captors that she would need time inside the fortress to negotiate the surrender and on being released she ordered the troops to prepare to defend the city. After it became clear Sforza had tricked them, the rebels threatened to execute her children in front of her as she watched from the battlements.

According to one account, Sforza responded by lifting up her skirt to expose her crotch and screaming, ‘I don’t care, look, I can make more.’ Other reports say she merely gave them the Renaissance equivalent of the middle finger. Either way, Sforza conveyed very clearly to the rebels that she wasn’t going to budge. The rebels were so shocked they didn’t know how to respond and failed to carry out their threat. Soon after, Sforza crushed the rebellion, rescued her children and celebrated by dragging the conspiracy’s ringleader around the streets behind her horse, before having him disembowelled alive in the town square.