A History of the World in Board Games

A Board games are among the oldest of all human pastimes, older than writing, older than most of the world's religions, older than nearly everything we think of as civilisation. In the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, archaeologists found beautifully made game boards some four and a half thousand years old, complete with playing pieces and dice, and games of comparable age have turned up across the ancient world. Wherever people gathered, it seems, they found the time to sit down and play. Dice, counters and marked boards turn up in the graves and rubbish heaps of the earliest cities, and the impulse behind them, the pleasure of a contest bounded by agreed rules, seems to be almost as old as human society itself.

B These early games were often bound up with belief. In ancient Egypt the game of Senet, played on a grid of thirty squares, came to be seen as a symbol of the soul's dangerous journey through the afterlife, and fine sets were placed in tombs so that the dead might play their way safely to the next world. To the Egyptians a board game was not merely idle fun; it could carry the deepest meanings of life and death, which is why so many boards survive buried alongside their owners. Similar beliefs attached to games elsewhere in the ancient world, where the fall of the dice could be read as the will of the gods, and to play was, in a sense, to seek their favour or to glimpse one's fate.

C No game has travelled further or changed more than chess. It is thought to have begun in India, around fifteen hundred years ago, as a game called chaturanga that represented the four divisions of an army. Carried westward through Persia and the Islamic world and on into Europe, it slowly transformed: pieces were renamed and their powers altered to fit each new society, so that the weak counsellor who once stood beside the king became, in Europe, the most powerful piece on the board, the queen. In its very design chess came to mirror the world of those who played it. The slow spread of the game, from court to court and country to country over many centuries, also makes it a kind of map of the connections between civilisations, each of which left its mark on the rules before passing the game along to the next.

D Some games were built to teach. The game known in English as Snakes and Ladders began in India as a lesson in morality: the ladders that carried a player upward stood for good deeds and virtues, while the snakes that dragged them down represented sins and vices, so that the passage across the board became a small parable of a life lived well or badly. Only later, stripped of its message, did it become the simple children's game of luck that is familiar today. It is a neat illustration of how a game can outlive the ideas that first gave it shape, keeping its board and its pieces while quietly shedding the meaning they once carried.

E Even the most famous modern board game hides a surprising history. Monopoly, in which players grow rich by buying property and charging rents, grew out of an earlier game called The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by an American woman named Lizzie Magie. Her intention was the very opposite of the modern game's spirit: she designed it to show how a few landlords could grow wealthy while everyone else was ruined, as a warning against the greed her game laid bare. In time the design was reworked, credited to another inventor, and sold as a celebration of the very fortune-hunting it had been meant to criticise. Magie received little credit and less money for her invention, and for many years the game was told as the story of a single clever man who had struck it rich in hard times, an irony that fits a game about the uneven rewards of the property market rather too well.

F Far from dying out in the age of screens, board games are enjoying a remarkable revival. A new wave of cleverly designed games, many of them from Europe, has drawn millions of players back to the table, prizing skilful decisions over mere luck and the pleasure of sitting face to face over any glowing display. The oldest of pastimes, it turns out, has lost none of its power to bring people together. If anything, the very presence of screens seems to have sharpened the appetite for an evening spent around a physical board, talking, laughing and plotting face to face, and designers today enjoy a freedom and an audience that the makers of ancient Ur could never have foreseen.