A Brief History of Board Games

This illustration shows how Nefertari, consort of Pharaoh Ramses II, plays Senet. Photo: imago / United Archives International
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Are we experiencing a golden age of board game? Authors and publishers are more productive and innovative than ever, more and more people meet to play together. We illuminate the background with a short history of board game.

Tutankhamun died very young. The ancient Egyptian pharaoh from the 14th century BC probably did not turn 20 years old. Not enough time for an influential reign. And yet it electrified the world when the British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered his almost undamaged tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. In addition to many treasures such as a gold death mask, the researchers also found one of the oldest board games in the world: Senet . A running game over 30 fields that symbolizes the crossing from this world to the other world. And that was known almost 5,000 years ago, as evidenced by historical accounts.

"The game is one of the oldest cultural assets"

Mehen is considered to be somewhat older , named after an Egyptian snake deity from the underworld. Game boards resembled a coiled snake with its head in the center, three lions and lionesses and several balls served as figures. Rules were not passed down, but the spiral design of the board survived and found a return to today as a game of geese or laddersknown running games. This builds a bridge from the beginning of civilization to the present day, which underlines the roots and importance of parlor game in human history. "The game is one of the oldest cultural assets, older than reading and writing," emphasizes the late author Erwin Glonnegger in the preface to "The Game Book". This is not only shown by the finds from Egypt.

The ladder game goes back to a game that already existed in ancient Egypt. Photo: imago / Ikon Images

Whether Babylon or Ur, India or China, Greece or Ancient Rome - people played in all previous civilizations. The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga saw in his book “Homo ludens” in 1938, which means as much as a playing person, the game as the origin of all cultures. Many games that are still popular today come from those epochs or are based on developments at that time. For example, Go , Dame and probably also mill have a millennia-old origin.

The die roll as a symbol of finding fate

Like the dice - the symbol for classic games par excellence. Its accidental throwing result was once primarily a symbol of finding fate. And not seldom did it affect fate. For example in backgammon . The dice game, the forerunner of which was already known as the 12-line game in the days of the Roman emperor Augustus, has tempted many players in many parts of the world to risk all their money as a stake. With quite negative consequences. Both for the player and for the game itself, because backgammon has been banned in public in many places. Nevertheless, it is still one of the most popular board games in the world.

Dice play an important role in backgammon. Photo: imago / Westend61

Backgammon is also an example of the fact that the design of antique game boards can be assigned a symbolic or even religious meaning. In his book “Games of Mankind”, Ulrich Schadler quotes astrological interpretations that see the number of days in a month in the 30 tokens, the number of zodiac signs in the twelve fields per row and a total of seven that are opposite each other from the eyes Sides of a cube is formed, the number of planets once suspected.

Original symbolism lost

Even the forerunner of today's well-known person does not annoy you , the Pachisi , which comes from India and is still there in everyday life , takes an ideological borrowing: The figures represent people who go in all four directions to finally return home to return. And be reborn after being beaten. The first person published a good hundred years ago does not annoy you has completely lost this original symbolism. Perhaps one of the reasons why playing is still downgraded to child's play by some. With the exception of the royal chess game, of course, whose Indian archetype Caturanga was first documented for the fifth century AD, or from card games like Skat or Bridge .

"Man don't annoy you" goes back to an Indian game. Photo: imago / teutopress

But this degradation of the game in general is by no means justified. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel once quoted the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes: “People don't stop playing because they get old; they grow old because they stop playing. ”Max J. Kobbert, author of the millionaire The Crazy Labyrinth , even wrote a declaration of love for the“ cultural asset game ”in a book. Games are vital. "They get the players out of a wide variety of social roles and always create a new form of equality." 

"Balancing sport for the soul"

Kobbert emphasizes that the game of the adult differs from that of the child only because he sees through this connection between reality and appearance and enjoys the game as a game. Glonnegger saw the game as a "balancing sport for the soul". For the duration of a game, people disappear into a foreign world and completely hide everyday life. They are annoyed by the results of the dice, cheer on the strategies they have developed or simply enjoy the company of their fellow players.