Board game

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  A board game is a tabletop game where small objects are placed and moved in particular ways across a specially patterned game board. The earliest known uses of the term itself fall between the 1840s and the 1850s. Yet the objects themselves are far older. Archaeological digs have pulled them from the ground in nearly every culture and society across history. As of 2024, fourteen sites have reported a total of fifty-one game boards from the Neolithic period, ranging from the early 7000s BC to the mid-6000s BC. So what counts as the oldest game in the world depends entirely on how strict you are about the requirements. How did a pastime carved into Neolithic limestone become a market raising hundreds of millions of dollars on crowdfunding alone? What separates a game decided purely by luck from one decided purely by skill? And why have scholars spent decades trying to sort these games into neat categories, only to find that many games refuse to sit still in just one?

• 2. The Contenders For Oldest

  ›

  Senet has been argued to be the oldest known board game in the world. Possible board fragments date to around 3100 BC, with undisputed pictorial representations from roughly 2686 BC to 2613 BC, found in ancient Egyptian Predynastic and First Dynasty burials reaching back as far as 3500 BC. Senet was played for thousands of years before falling out of fashion sometime after AD 400, during the Roman period. Its rules were never written down, so they are not decisively known. Mehen, also from ancient Egypt, sits among the oldest games dated with reasonable confidence, at roughly 3000 BC to 2300 BC, with some estimates pushing it back to around 3500 BC. Its rules, scoring system, and pieces remain unknown or speculative. The Royal Game of Ur is estimated to have originated around 2500 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, with specimens recovered from royal tombs. It has been claimed as the oldest playable board game in the world, because a Babylonian astronomer wrote its well-defined rules onto a cuneiform tablet around 177 BC to 176 BC. Some of the oldest discovered gaming pieces come from southwest Turkey, a set of elaborate sculptured stones grouped in fours, speculated to suit a chess-like game and created during the Bronze Age around 3000 BC. In 1977, the Italian Archaeological Mission found a related game in grave number 731, a pseudo-catacomb grave at Shahr-i Sokhta, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Iran. That set held 27 pieces and 4 different dice, dating to 2600 to 2400 BC, and it too has been called the oldest complete and playable board game ever found.

• 3. Golden Ages And Renaissances

  ›

  The 1880s to 1920s mark an epoch that American art historian Margaret Hofer named the Golden Age. Mass production made board games cheaper and more widely available, and the popularity of the hobby surged. The most popular game sold during this stretch was Monopoly, released in 1935, with 500 million games played as of 1999. In the late 1990s, companies began producing more new games to serve a growing worldwide market. The Settlers of Catan, from 1995, is often credited with popularising German-style board games outside of Europe and broadening the hobbyist market. The early 21st century then brought what people call the Board Game Renaissance. Carcassonne, from 2000, and Ticket to Ride, from 2004, were a major part of this shift, moving the hobby away from the 20th-century dominance of standbys like Monopoly and the 1960 Game of Life. Mancala shows how slippery dating can be. This broad family of games, built around two rows of small carved divots, has been estimated across wildly different periods: roughly 800 BC to 200 BC at Roman settlements, 2500 BC to 1500 BC in Egypt, and even 7000 BC to 5000 BC in Jordan, the last drawn from limestone divots in a Neolithic dwelling dated to around 5870 BC, though that claim has been disputed.

• 4. Luck, Strategy, And Diplomacy

  ›

  Chess depends completely on player skill, while children's games such as Candy Land, from 1949, and snakes and ladders require no decisions at all and are decided purely by luck. Most games fall somewhere in between. A player can be hampered by bad luck in backgammon, Monopoly, or Risk, but over many games a skilled player wins more often, and the chance element makes for more excitement and more varied strategies. Dice are the oldest way to inject luck, reaching back to the Royal Game of Ur, and they decide everything from how many steps a token moves in Monopoly to how forces fare in battle in Risk to which resources a player gains in Catan. Other games reach for randomness differently. Sorry!, from 1934, shuffles a deck of special cards, Scrabble, from 1948, draws randomly picked letters, and still others use spinners or timers of random length. German-style games are notable for carrying fewer elements of luck. Symmetry can also reduce luck, as in Ludo, from around 1896, where each player may roll the dice or use the previous player's roll. Diplomacy is its own dimension. Negotiation generally appears only with three or more players, and an important facet of Catan is convincing others to trade with you rather than your opponents. In Risk, players may team up against a leader. Advanced diplomacy, as in the 1954 game aptly named Diplomacy, means making elaborate plans together with the possibility of betrayal. Some games also hide information: perfect information games like chess show every player the full state, while Tigris and Euphrates, from 1997, or Stratego, from 1946, keep some of it concealed.

• 5. Sorting The Unsortable

  ›

  Harold Murray's A History of Board Games Other Than Chess, published in 1952, has been called the first attempt to build a scheme for classifying board games. He split them into five categories: race, war, hunt, alignment or configuration, and mancala games. Robert Bell's Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, from 1960, offered four categories: race, war, positional, and mancala. David Parlett's The Oxford History of Board Games, from 1999, drew on both predecessors to describe a classical grouping of four primary categories: race, space, chase, and displace games. Modern games resist such tidiness. They can be sorted by mechanics, theme, age range, player number, and even promotion, and the sheer diversity means many games belong to several categories at once. Mechanics alone produce dozens of labels. Area control games like Risk have players competing to dominate a map. Worker-placement games like Agricola assign worker tokens to board spaces to trigger actions. Deck-builders like Dominion let each player reshape an identical starting deck during play. Legacy games like Pandemic Legacy make permanent physical changes to their own components, applying stickers or tearing up cards for a one-time experience. Parlett also separated abstract games from thematic ones, the latter carrying a specific genre or frame narrative, such as regular chess versus Star Wars-themed chess.

• 6. Themes And Their Critics

  ›

  Edwards delivered a blunt verdict on games dressed up in borrowed clothing. "A bad game, however, remains a bad game even if it has been themed to a favorite television show." The criticism usually lands when trending concepts, like popular television licenses, are bolted on to paper over weak mechanics. Parlett went further, describing promotional and television spin-off games as being of an essentially trivial, ephemeral, mind-numbing, and ultimately soul-destroying degree of worthlessness. The themes themselves trace the preoccupations of their eras. In the Golden Era, prominent themes included travel, sports, courtship, racism, city life, war, education, and capitalist enterprise. Modern thematic categories run from horror and fantasy to farming, flight, mafia, and space exploration. Historical simulation games map onto detailed period bands, from before 4000 BC for prehistoric settings through the 1939 to 1945 World War II window and up to modern warfare. Patolli shows how deep these roots run in the Americas, originating in Mesoamerica and played by a wide range of pre-Columbian cultures such as the Toltecs and the Aztecs.

• 7. What The Research Found

  ›

  A dedicated field studies all of this, known as game studies or ludology. Much of the scientific attention has gone to older games like chess, Go, and mancala, with less on Monopoly, Scrabble, and Risk, and even less on modern titles like Catan, Agricola, and Pandemic. Chess draws heavy study partly because tournament players are publicly ranked, which makes expertise comparable. The works of Adriaan de Groot, William Chase, Herbert A. Simon, and Fernand Gobet established that knowledge, more than the ability to anticipate moves, plays an essential role in chess-playing ability. The findings reach into childhood development. Linearly arranged board games have improved children's spatial numerical understanding, because they resemble a number line and promote a linear sense of numbers rather than the innate logarithmic one. Games like Snakes and Ladders produce significant improvements in counting, recognizing numbers, numerical estimation, and number comprehension, and each grasp of a game piece practices fine motor skills. Play has also been tied to stronger executive functions in children and to a reduced risk of dementia in the elderly. Bruce Halpenny, a games inventor, framed the appeal in emotional terms when discussing his game The Great Train Robbery. He said the gamble taken early in the game builds tension that is released once the train is robbed, and that this release is therapeutic in a society where most jobs are boring and repetitive.

• 8. Screens And Spending

  ›

  Many board games now exist as video games, aptly termed digital board games, distinguished by the ability to play online against a computer or other people. Sites like boardgamearena.com and yucata.de allow real-time play that immediately shows opponents' moves, while others notify players by email after each move. Cheaper home printing fed print-and-play games that can be purchased and printed at home, and some titles lean on external media like audio cassettes or DVDs. Virtual tabletop programs such as Vassal, Tabletop Simulator, and Tabletopia can run almost any board or card game, while Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds specialise in role-playing material, the latter licensed for both Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. The money behind all this has grown sharply since the late 1990s. A 1991 estimate put the global board game market over $1.2 billion, and crowd-sourcing has become a large facet of it, with $233 million raised on Kickstarter in 2020. Regional figures vary widely. A 2009 estimate placed the American board game market around $800 million, a 2011 estimate put the Chinese market over 10 billion yuan, and in 2009 Germany was considered the best market per capita, with the highest number of games sold per individual. Hobby games form their own slice, with a 2015 estimate suggesting a hobby game market value of almost $900 million. The next time a Neolithic divot turns up in limestone, the question will not be whether people played, but which of these many definitions the find finally satisfies.