'A game of strategy, such as chess or backgammon, played by moving pieces on a board and sometimes involving dice.'
Board Games have been a massively popular in many cultures and societies for a very long time and have been around a lot longer than people may think. The earliest signs of the first board game date back to around 3100 B.C. Since then, board games are constantly being developed and evolved whether it be the simplicity of snakes & Ladders to the brutal and unforgiving pandemic, people have and will continue to play these types of games for a very long time.
3100 B.C is said to be the earliest known existence of board games with a board game called Senet being played as far back as Predynastic and Ancient Egyptian dates and is still even popular today in Egypt. The word Senet roughly translates in Egyptian to 'Game of Passing.'
The game board consists of thirty grid squares, arranged in three rows
of ten. A Senet board has two sets of pawns. Due to the game being played as far back as 3100 B.C nobody is completely sure how to correctly play the game but a number of people and countries have created their own specific sets of rules for the board game.
Mehen is another example of a board game played in the ancient Egyptian period. The board game which dates back to 3000 B.C, is a reference to Mehen, a mythological snake-god and is played on a coiled up snake shaped board. Images of four players playing the game are found depicted on tomb
walls. Some of the scenes include inscriptions above the players translating to phrases such as, “I am playing Mehen against you” or “seizing
Mehen.”
The board as previously stated is in the shape of a coiled up snake which is divided into a number of rectangular spaces but due to how old the game is, no rules for playing the board game have ever been discovered. However, a
similar Arab game, known as the Hyena Game, which will be discussed later on share remarkable
characteristics for the board and pieces to Mehen.
Another game which dates back to 3000 B.C which is a lot more well known and is still, after 5000 years being played today and that is the board game, Backgammon. Backgammon is one of the oldest board games for two players and is played all around the world even to the present day. The playing pieces are moved according to the roll of dice,
and players win by removing all of their pieces from the board. There
are many variants of backgammon, most of which share similar traits.
Backgammon is a member of the tables family, one of the oldest classes of board games in the world.
Although this is the case the board game is still very much in circulation with the game still being played all over the world as well as in competition. The first ever world championship competition in backgammon was held in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1967 and ever since the World Backgammon Association (WBA) have been holding a number of huge tournaments and opens with the tournament payout more often than not being a staggering $1,000,000 for first place.
2560 B.C : THE ROYAL GAME OF UR
The Royal Game
of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, refers to two game boards
found in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard
Woolley in the 1920s.
The two boards date
from the First Dynasty of Ur, before 2600 BC, thus making the Royal Game
of Ur one of the oldest examples of board gaming equipment found,
although Senet boards found in Egyptian graves predate it as much as
900 years.
The game is still
played. One of the two boards is exhibited in the collections of
the British Museum in London.
The Royal Game of Ur
was played with two sets, one black and one white, of seven markers and
four tetrahedral dice. The rules of the game as it was played
in Mesopotamia are not known.
The game is said to
be a predecessor of the previously mentioned Backgammon
500 B.C : MAHJONG
Mahjong is
a game that originated in China, commonly played by four. Mahjong is a game of
skill, strategy and calculation and involves a certain degree of chance.
One of the myths of
the origin of mahjong suggests that Confucius, the Chinese
philosopher, developed the game in about 500 BC.
The game is played
with a set of 136 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols,
although some regional variations use a different number of tiles.
Many historians
believe it was based on a Chinese card game called Mǎdiào in the early Ming
dynasty. This game was
played with 40 paper cards
similar on size and characteristics to Mahjong tiles.
600 A.D: Chess
Chess is a
two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a
checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid.
Chess is believed to
have originated in northwest India during the Gupta
empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as chaturaṅga,
infantry cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the
pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook.
It is one of the world's
most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home,
in clubs, online
and in tournaments.
All over the world
people compete in a number of different tournaments and championships in order
to become the chess ‘grandmaster’.
The first
official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in
1886 with the current World
Champion is Indian chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand.
700 A.D: Mancala
1874 : Parcheesi
1938 : Scrabble
Mancala or Awele is a board game of pure
skill for two or more players depending upon the variation of the game being played. Some
variants of the game can be played by as many as six players.
There is evidence
from temple carvings that the game was played in the Egypt of the Pharaohs at
least 3,000 years ago and today it is widespread over the continent as well as many parts of the
East and throughout the Caribbean.
Mancala is not one
game, but at least two hundred games linked by similar equipment and a
fundamental system of play. The games vary in board arrangements and rule details and are generally different
depending on country.
The basic rules are very
simple to learn and therefore it is easy to play, but it takes many years to
master.
1874 : Parcheesi
Parcheesi is
a brand name American adaptation of the Indian Cross
and Circle game Pachisi
Created
in India perhaps as early as 500 AD, the board game is
subtitled Royal Game of India because royalty played using colour-costumed members of their
harems as pieces on large outdoor boards.
The game and its
variants are known worldwide; for example, a similar game
called Parchís is especially popular in Spain as well as a version being available in
the United Kingdom under the name of Ludo.
Parcheesi is played with
one or two dice and the goal of the game is to move each of
one's pieces home to the center space. The most popular Parcheesi boards in
America have 68 spaces around the edge of the board, twelve of which are
darkened safe spaces where a piece cannot be captured.
The first player to
get all four pieces home wins.
Scrabble is
a word game in which two to four players score points
by forming words from individual lettered tiles on
a gameboard marked with a 15×15 grid.
In 1938, American
architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an
earlier word game he invented called Lexiko
The new game, which
he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15×15 gameboard and the
crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not
successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.
Selchow and Righter
bought the trademark to the game in 1972. JW Spears began
selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. The company is
now a subsidiary of Mattel. In
1986, Selchow and
Righter was sold to Coleco, who soon after went bankrupt. The company's
assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi, were purchased
by Hasbro.
Tens of thousands
play club and tournament Scrabble worldwide. The National Scrabble Championship: an open event
attracting several hundred players, held around July/August every year or two,
most recently in Orlando, Florida in 2012.
1957 : Risk
Risk is
a strategic board game, produced by Parker Brothers (now a
division of Hasbro). It was invented by French film
director Albert Lamorisse
and was originally released
in 1957 as La Conquête du Monde which translates to "The Conquest of the World" in English.
The standard version is
played on a board depicting a political map of the Earth, divided
into forty-two territories, which are grouped into six continents. The
primary object of the game is "world domination," or "to occupy
every territory on the board and in so doing, eliminate all other players.
Players control
armies with which they attempt to capture territories from other players, with
results determined by dice rolls.
Like Monopoly, the
board game has gained mass popularity and because of which, a number of
versions of the game have been made
including one for the incredibly popular video game; Metal Gear Solid.
1980 : THE BIRTH OF GERMAN-STYLE BOARD GAMES
A German-style
board game, also referred to as a German game or Euro-style game, is a class
of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium
playing times, indirect player interaction, and usually keep all
the players in the game until it ends.
Contemporary examples
of modern German-style board games referred to as German-style, such
as Acquire, appeared in the 1960s. The recent genre as a more concentrated
design movement began in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Germany.
Today, Germany publishes
more board games than any other country per capita.
The phenomenon has spread to other European countries such as France,
the Netherlands,
and Sweden.
The Settlers of
Catan, first published in 1995, paved the way for the genre in the United
States and outside Europe. It
was neither the first
"German game" nor the first such game to find an audience outside
Germany, but it became much more popular than any of its predecessors. It
quickly sold millions of copies in Germany, and in the process brought money
and attention to the genre as a whole.
1995: Settlers Of Catan
The Settlers of
Catan is a multiplayer board game designed by Klaus
Teuber and first published
in 1995 in Germany by Franckh-Kosmos Verlag.
Players assume the
roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading
and acquiring resources. Players are rewarded points as their settlements grow;
the first to reach a set number of points is the winner. At no point in the game
is any player eliminated.
The Settlers of
Catan was one of the first German-style board games to achieve
popularity outside of Europe.
By 2009, over 15 million
games in the Catan series had been sold, The game has been
translated into thirty languages from the original German. It is especially popular
in the United States where it
has been called "the board game of our time" by the Washington
Post.
The enduring popularity
of The Settlers of Catan has led to the creation of a great many
spinoff games and products, starting in 1996 with The Settlers of
Catan card game and including a novel by Rebecca Gablé set on the island of Catan.
2000 : CARCASSONNE
Carcassonne is
a tile-based German-style board game for two to five players,
designed by Klaus-
Jürgen Wrede and
published in 2000 by Hans im Glück in German
It is named after
the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne in
southern France,
famed for its city walls.
The game
board is a medieval landscape built by the players as the game progresses.
The game starts with a single terrain tile face up and 71
others shuffled face down for the
players to draw from. On each turn a player draws a new terrain
tile and places it
adjacent to tiles that are already face up.
The game ends when
the last tile has been placed. At that time, all features
(including fields)
score points for the players with the most followers on them. The
player with the most
points wins the game.
Due to its extreme
popularity several official
expansions for Carcassonne have
been published, which add numerous additional rules, tiles
and new kinds of figures.
Together, they can
more than double the length of the game. These expansions are
generally compatible
with each other and may be played together.
2008 : Pandemic
Pandemic is
a cooperative board game designed by Matt Leacock and published
by Z-Man Games in 2008.
Pandemic is based on
the premise that four diseases have broken out in the world, each
threatening to wipe out a region. The game accommodates 2 to 4 players,
each playing one of five possible specialists: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations or expert.
The game is unlike
most board games as the game play is cooperative,
rather than competitive. Through the combined effort of all the players, the
goal is to discover all four cures before any of several game-losing conditions
are reached.
The game has been so
popular that It has won a number of awards including the following:
--GAMES Magazine – Best
New Family Game – 2009
--Golden Geek Award –
Best Expansion – 2009 (for Pandemic: On the Brink)
