4.1 Early Board Games

Early Board Games

 
For many of us, board games are the way we are introduced to games: Chess, Checkers, Go, Candyland, Monopoly.

Today, we are going to talk about the early history of board games through two main forms of board games: roll to move and move to capture games.

I think that the distinction between the two is very helpful, and I’m looking forward to exploring it in today’s video.

PART 1: The Early History of Board Games

What is a board game?

Well, for starters they have a board!

The board is a physical representation of a boundary in which game play takes place.

Like all games, board games have rules, and usually there are markings on the board that symbolize the rules.

These elements are fixed and unchanging: the board.

All board games need an element that changes as well, which is why board games also have board game pieces.

These are the elements that the players manipulate, such as checkers or dice.

Checkers are unit pieces, they are used to mark position on the board and recur in both move-to-capture such as Chess or Go and roll-to-move board games like Monopoly or Backgammon.

While the unit pieces are essential to both kinds of play, dice, or other implements for generating a random number such as sticks, are essential for the roll-to-move style of game.

Here, I want to dwell on this for a moment, because I think that dice connect to bigger historical traditions of divinatory practices and serve as an artifact that validates some of Johann Huizinga’s cultural history of play.

I’m sure we’ve all rolled dice before.

They represent the reality of chance, as they are unpredictable.

Divination, or foretelling of the future is, theoretically impossible.

But in many ways it is a foundation of culture – throughout many civilizations around the globe there have been people who have performed this function.

Divination involves the use of language, ritual and ultimately the creation of myth or story.

The action of divination is something like theater, as it is something that happens – it exists, so then it becomes myth.

If we recall, Johann Huizinga opens his book Homo Ludens with the sentence “Play is older than culture”.

Remember, Huizinga makes his argument that play is older than culture by looking at all the other unique aspects of human society that he believes are based on play.

For him, language is the “play” of naming things, myth is the “play” of imagining and re-imagining the natural world, and finally ritual is the “play” of transforming the world.

One place you can see this demonstrated remarkably is in the development of Chinese written language.

In the Shang dynasty, a form of divination involved the cracking of turtle shells and interpreting where the cracks formed.

Chinese written language is composed of strokes, and you can see in the I Ching the throwing of sticks to be interpreted as hexagrams.

Here we can see how play, language and myth all intermingle.

It is precisely in other global histories of ritual and early divinatory practices that we can trace the origin of dice.

It is theorized that dice developed from the practice of fortune-telling with the talus of hoofed animals, colloquially known as knucklebones.

Greek astragalomancy or consulting of a dice oracle was performed using sheeps’ hooves with numbers cut into them.

There was also a parallel history of Tibetan use of pāśaka, symbolizing the intertwining of human fate with the fates of animals in hunting or agriculture.

When you move to the present day, it’s amazing to see how dice are still in use in a variety of different games.

From casinos to tabletop role playing games, there is something that excites the mind about a game based on chance.

Dice represent the presence of chance in our everyday lives, and games are a structured activity that allow us to experience that with different stakes.

Part 2: Defining Roll-to-move and Move-to-capture

There are two main kinds of board games: roll-to-move and move-to-capture.

Roll-to-move games. In the case of roll-to-move games, dice are used to determine the movements of the game pieces along a set track.

This is similar to Candy Land, Snakes and Ladders, and Monopoly. This is a major category of early (and modern) games.

Oftentimes, these games are made for children, to teach them social mechanics such as cooperation and winning/losing.

These games are more linear in their layout, but all use the element of chance and movement as the structuring game mechanic.

They’re also sometimes known as “racing games”, as even in backgammon you are trying to move from a starting position to the end position.

One of the oldest board games ever made is a roll-to-move game: Senet, from ancient egypt.

Its full ancient name was senet net hab, which means ‘game of passing through’; this is because the aim of the game is to get from one end of the board to the other.

I should say probably because no one really knows what the exact rules are.

This modern version of it I have here has had a new rule set adapted to it.

This is how the game works: you throw sticks as your dice to determine how far you can move on a turn.

Players alternate throwing sticks to move around the board.

The first player to move all of their pieces off the board wins.

What makes Senet so interesting to my mind, and connects it to contemporary roll-to-move games, is that it represents cultural beliefs that the Egyptians had.

Like in Monopoly or the Game of Life, which we’ll be looking at in a moment, landing on certain squares have certain benefits.

• Square 15 is the 'House of Life'. This is a safe square; a piece cannot be swapped off it.
• You must land on Square 26, the 'House of Happiness' in order to progress further. This is a safe square.
• Square 27 is the 'House of Water'. Landing on this square sends the piece back to Square 15, the 'House of Life'.
• Pieces can leave the board from Squares 26 ('House of Happiness'}, Square 28 (three ba-birds), Square 29 (two men), and Square 30 ('House of Ra-Horakhty') if the correct number of spaces is thrown. These are all safe squares.
From reading the Book of Senet, many of the rules and significant numbers are based on religious and mythic concepts from Ancient Egypt.

Even the numbers of positions on the board represented numbers that were associated with the Egyptian religion.

Pharaohs, kings, would play this game almost as an allegory for their own spiritual progress.

It’s incredible that this artifact has survived this long, and I think it’s also very interesting that it resists interpretation, that we don’t fully understand all of the cultural and religious values that are associated with the game.

One could say it hasn’t aged well.

But, look at how similar this is to the game of LIfe.

Created in 1860 by Milton Bradley, a lithographer, it was a checkered board game that represented things that could happen in your life.

“Intemperance” is something to be avoided – the game has a strong moral message like Snakes and Ladders.

In the modern version, the game simulates a person's travels through their life, from early adulthood to retirement, with college if necessary, jobs, marriage, and possible children along the way.

I wanted to bring this up because if you look at this version of the game of life, how do you think someone from another culture might view this?

It is so filled with the cultural values of the time, I’m sure that we’ll look back on it as dated as well.

I think that this is a very interesting aspect of these “race” roll-to-move games.

There are other kinds of roll-to-move games that combine with elements of move-to-capture, such as backgammon, but I am going to omit that for now so we can define move-to-capture.

Move-to-capture. In move-to-capture games such as Chess or Go, the players take turns moving pieces on the board to capture the opponents pieces and score points.

These are games where there are set rules for how to place/move pieces with the intent of capturing enemy pieces

Because these games do not have the chance-based element, they are more skill based.

Think about a game like Chess.

Chess has a set of rules that many of us know: a pawn can move two at the beginning, the knight can move in an L shape, etc.

When we play the game, we apply this set of rules to make decisions based on the moves that our opponent makes.

Games like this are a lot about player choice, agency.

Think about how many different configurations can exist in a game of chess.

To go a step further, look at the game Go.

Go is also about move-to-capture, however it deals with the capture of territory rather than the capture of individual pieces.

Go is the most popular board game in the world based on population, as it originated in ancient China before being adapted by other cultures.

These games are so powerful because they create culture in a different way than racing roll-to-move games do.

Take a look at these books of strategy for Chess.

They present you with famous games that took place between strong players.

Look at the different levels of Go players that exist and have been formalized.

The narrative of each game is determined by player choice and agency.

In this way, the novelty and competition of each match is based more on the players than on the roll of the dice.

Culture emerges from games like this, because they do not rely on a pre-existing board that has a start and end state.

They are more abstract, which is also why they are used as testing grounds for artificial intelligence.

Socially, they represent tactics, strategy and competition.

These games are life-long games that tend to stand the test of time and are played more often by older people

Part 3: Board Games Can Teach Us About Life

It’s amazing to see how we can associate different social values with these games.

Speaking from my own experience, I can definitely say that I associate racing style games like Life and Monopoly with spending time with my family, a lower stakes kind of fun where the game is just as much about how the people you’re playing with interpret the rules.

Whereas my experiences playing games like Chess and Checkers are associated with the thrill of competition, strategy, testing my wits, and the agony of defeat.

These board games are amazing because we can see they exist on a continuum about human agency and the role of chance in our lives.

On one side is a view of life where chance is a key element.

On the other side is a view of life where strategy and agency are the key elements.

Look at Senet.

The goal of the game and all of Egyptian culture was to ascend to immortality.

Yet there is always a displacement of agency in ancient mythology.

As one example, Sumerian myths, each city had its own patron deity.

Mythology and history were intertwined, because if a misfortune happened to a city, it would be ascribed to the deity doing something.

So we can imagine how by playing Senet, ancient Egyptian pharoahs were rehearsing the myths of immortality.

Flash forward, board games in the 1800s and 1900s were more or less novelties, but while they may have been less popular than before, they still fulfilled the same roles

Snakes and Ladders, and many derivatives of it, were often used as moralistic tools for children.
Heaven and Hell, sin and virtue.

These games, once again, taught you how to live, and how to live with the element of chance and the unknowability of the future.

These games were still filling the same role in society as ancient games like Senet - teaching younger people the morals of their society.

In the modern day, many board games have become cultural icons, and many have been adapted to other mediums, such as video games or movies

Such as Battleship and Battleship: the Movie, and while the movie may not be super faithful to the board game, it does show the willingness of our culture to expand these board games to new formats

We started out with religions and large storyscapes becoming games.

Now we have games becoming huge storyscapes that rival religions.

But why do most of them fail?

It’s because the core of these games isn’t in their “expansive stories”, but really it’s in the interactivity and competition that can only be found in a game.

And it’s here that I want to draw attention to something that both roll-to-move and move-to-capture games have in common – they are turn-based.

There are other elements that unify both forms: the games are determined by a start and some end state, and there is usually a way of tallying the relative scores of the two players such that the victor can be decided.

But think about how turn-based is the fundamental aspect of interactivity.

The turn is a fundamental aspect of empathy.

Each player is given an amount of time to think about their next move.

To make a decision.

Or to roll the dice.

It’s in that moment of taking your turn, that your imagination can be active.

Our society is now one that places a very high priority on imagination, and in particular the commodification of the imagination into sellable products.

Our culture is defined by the technological leaps forward of recent years which are allowing us to communicate in new ways, spread ideas and media faster than ever before.

Digital games are part of that stream, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

But remember, board games are the precursor to the culture we live in now.

And I believe it is precisely here that we can see an important continuity that is very important between board games and our modern digital games: the idea of a start and an ending that are determined through counting.