94 Fun Facts About Board Game History

Which ancient Egyptian board game is often cited as one of the world's oldest?

Senet may reach back some 5,000 years, to possible boards in First Dynasty burials; by the time sets went into New Kingdom royal tombs, the game had come to stand for the soul's journey through the underworld.

Which British archaeologist rediscovered the Royal Game of Ur while excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur?

Leonard Woolley unearthed five boards in graves at Ur between 1922 and 1934, which is why a game once played right across the Middle East now carries the name of a single city.

Which family of 'sowing and counting' board games takes its name from an Arabic word meaning 'to move'?

Mancala comes from the Arabic naqala, 'to move'. The games need no bought set: players can scoop rows of pits in the earth and sow stones, beans or seeds around them.

The game of chess is believed to have originated from an ancient game called Chaturanga in which country?

India gave chess its ancestor: chaturanga means the four divisions of an army, and its infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots evolved into today's pawns, knights, bishops and rooks.

Which ancient Chinese board game was one of the 'Four Arts' of the cultured gentleman?

Go, or weiqi, sat beside calligraphy, painting and the guqin zither as a scholar's accomplishment. Legend says Emperor Yao had it devised to steady his unruly son.

Shahr-e Sukhteh, the 'Burnt City' where a Bronze Age board game was found complete with its dice, is in which country?

Iran's Shahr-e Sukhteh, in Sistan and Baluchestan, yielded a board with four dice and 27 pieces; because the set was complete, researchers could work out playable rules for it.

The modern board game Ludo is a simplified version of which ancient Indian cross-and-circle game?

Ludo simplifies Pachisi, India's cross-and-circle race game played on a cloth board with cowrie shells as dice; Mughal emperor Akbar had a life-size court at Fatehpur Sikri where people served as pieces.

Which 5x5-grid game is considered a direct ancestor of modern checkers (draughts)?

Alquerque reached Spain with the Moors and its rules appear in Alfonso X's 13th-century Book of Games; moved onto a chessboard, its jumping captures became draughts.

Monopoly descends from which game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904?

The Landlord's Game was meant as a warning: Magie built it to show how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants, yet its land-grabbing play is what survived as Monopoly.

Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts had trained and worked in which profession before losing his job in the early 1930s?

Architect Alfred Butts, out of work in the early 1930s, filled his idle hours designing a word game he called Lexiko, the forerunner of Scrabble.

Anthony E. Pratt dreamed up Cluedo while sheltering from wartime air raids in which city in the English Midlands?

Birmingham musician Anthony Pratt, by then working in a tank-parts factory, drew on the whodunit party games he had watched guests play at the hotels where he performed.

Trivial Pursuit, devised by two newspapermen in 1979, comes from which country?

Canada: Montreal journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott released the game there in 1981 with a first run of only 1,100 copies; within a few years it had sold 20 million.

Which 1995 Klaus Teuber title was among the first Eurogames to catch on outside Europe?

Catan came from Klaus Teuber, a dental technician who designed games as an escape from a job he disliked; its success let him leave the laboratory and design full-time.

The properties on the original Monopoly board were named after locations in and around which place?

Atlantic City, New Jersey, got there via Quaker players who renamed the streets on Lizzie Magie's earlier game to match their town.

Elizabeth Magie designed her 1904 realty game to teach the economic ideas of which American thinker?

Henry George held that land rents enrich owners at everyone else's expense; Magie, finding his ideas hard to get across, hoped that players who felt the squeeze on a board would grasp them.

The 12th-century Lewis chessmen, found on a Scottish island in 1831, are mostly carved from which material?

Walrus ivory, probably hunted in Greenland and traded to Norway, where the kings, queens and bishops are thought to have been carved before the hoard was buried on Lewis.

The Royal Game of Ur survived into the 1950s only among the Jewish community of which Indian city?

Kochi's Jewish community, whose forebears are thought to have carried the game from the Middle East, played it as 'Asha' until they began leaving for Israel in the 1950s.

Which British Museum curator reconstructed the rules of the Royal Game of Ur from a cuneiform tablet?

Irving Finkel deciphered a cuneiform rules tablet written in 177 BC by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu, restoring the game's play after more than two millennia.

Who beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 in the chess showdown dubbed the Match of the Century?

Bobby Fischer's win ended 24 years of Soviet hold on the world title; billed as a Cold War duel, it drew more attention than any chess match before it.

In Go, what are the points added to White's score to compensate for moving second called?

Komi entered professional Go only in the 20th century, once Black's first move was accepted as a real edge; it is usually a fraction such as 6.5 so the final count cannot come out level.

Who claimed the title of first universally recognised World Chess Champion in 1886?

Wilhelm Steinitz began terribly: Johannes Zukertort led 4-1 after the opening games in New York, but Steinitz stormed back in St. Louis and New Orleans to take ten wins first.

In 1997, which IBM computer became the first to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a match?

Deep Blue had lost to Kasparov the year before; IBM retired the machine after the rematch.

What is the highest number shown on a standard backgammon doubling cube?

The doubling cube's six faces read 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64; it sits at 64 to mean a stake of 1 until the first double is offered.

Backgammon gained its doubling cube in 1920s gaming clubs in which country?

America, in New York's gaming clubs: before rolling, a player may offer to double the stakes, and the opponent must either accept or concede the game on the spot.

What did Alfred Butts call his board-and-tiles word game before it was renamed Scrabble?

Criss-Crosswords was Butts's name for it; he set the tile mix by counting how often each letter appeared on the front page of The New York Times, and James Brunot renamed it Scrabble in 1948.

How many tiles are in an English-language Scrabble set?

An English Scrabble set has 100 tiles, two of them blank. Butts fixed how many of each letter by counting how often it turned up in print, hence twelve Es and a single Z.

Hnefatafl, a game of a king escaping his besiegers, was carried across northern Europe by which seafarers before chess displaced it?

The Vikings took tafl games to Iceland, Britain and Ireland; chess supplanted them in the 12th century, though a Sami version lasted long enough for Linnaeus to write down its rules in 1732.

Cluedo's name blends 'clue' with 'ludo', Latin for what?

I play: the pun leaned on Ludo, a board game popular in Britain; Americans barely knew that name, so Parker Brothers sold their sets simply as Clue.

What did Milton Bradley's 1860 Checkered Game of Life use in place of dice, then tainted by gambling?

A spinning top called a teetotum, with six numbered sides, let respectable households play without touching dice; more than 45,000 copies sold by the following year.

Risk was invented in 1957 by which French film director?

Albert Lamorisse, maker of the Oscar-winning short The Red Balloon, designed the game between films; Parker Brothers bought the rights, changed a few rules and launched it in the United States in 1959.

On the classic Risk board, holding which continent earns the biggest army bonus?

Asia pays seven armies a turn, against just two for little Australia; yet seasoned players grab Australia first, because it can be defended from a single country.

In Klaus Teuber's island-settling game, the robber must be moved whenever a player rolls what?

Rolling a seven moves the robber: the roller places it on a new hex, which produces nothing until it leaves, and steals a card from a neighbouring player.

Milton Bradley's American version of Snakes and Ladders, sold from 1943, is called what?

Chutes and Ladders replaced the snakes with playground slides when Milton Bradley issued it in 1943; in the Indian original, ladders stood for virtues and snakes for vices.

In 2007 the Chinook team proved that which game always ends in a draw when both sides play perfectly?

Checkers: Jonathan Schaeffer's University of Alberta team worked on the proof from 1989, and their program Chinook had already taken a world title when champion Marion Tinsley withdrew ill in 1994.

Candy Land was designed in the 1940s by schoolteacher Eleanor Abbott while she was recovering from what?

Eleanor Abbott devised Candy Land while recovering from polio in a San Diego hospital, for the children on the polio ward; Milton Bradley published it in 1949.

Twister was originally developed under what working name before Milton Bradley licensed it in 1966?

Pretzel was the name Charles Foley and Neil Rabens gave it, but Milton Bradley found the name was already taken by another toy and launched the game as Twister instead.

The first commercial version of Battleship, published in 1931 by the Starex company, was called what?

Salvo put onto printed pads a pencil-and-paper game that Russian officers are said to have played on hand-drawn grids around the time of World War I; the plastic peg-board Battleship arrived only in 1967.

Ticket to Ride, first released in 2004, was designed by whom?

Alan R. Moon kept it simple enough to fit on a train ticket: each turn you draw cards, claim a route or take new destination tickets. It brought him a second Spiel des Jahres.

Matt Leacock based his cooperative game Pandemic on which real epidemic?

Matt Leacock has said the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak inspired Pandemic (2008); players start in Atlanta, home of the CDC, and race to cure four diseases before outbreaks overwhelm the world.

Which game's board is split by a 'river' named for the Chu-Han border, which its elephants can never cross?

Xiangqi, or Chinese chess, labels its central river 'Chu River, Han Border' after the war that founded the Han dynasty; elephants must stay home, while soldiers gain a sideways move once across.

Milton Bradley turned to board games in 1860 after his lithograph of which politician was ruined when its subject grew a beard?

Abraham Lincoln was clean-shaven in Bradley's fast-selling print; once he grew his famous beard, buyers demanded refunds, and Bradley put his press to work on The Checkered Game of Life.

Which 1946 game hides information from players, unlike a perfect-information game such as chess?

Stratego hides every piece's rank until two pieces clash, so bluffing counts: the lowly Spy can even take the top-ranked Marshal, provided it strikes first.

Twister became a hit in 1966 after which talk-show host played it on air with Eva Gabor?

Johnny Carson's Tonight Show tangle with Gabor rescued a game Sears had refused to list as too racy: shoppers queued for it the next day, and three million copies sold in 1967.

Kriegsspiel, the tabletop battle game used to train officers from the 1820s, was developed by the army of which German kingdom?

Prussia's army took up Kriegsspiel to teach tactics; after its victory over France in 1871, armies elsewhere copied the idea, and civilians began playing wargames for fun.

Which board game originated in Mesoamerica and was played by the Toltecs and Aztecs?

Patolli was a gambling race game with marked beans for dice; players staked blankets, gems, even their freedom, and the Spanish suppressed it after the conquest.

Which ancient Egyptian game, played on a coiled-snake board and dated to about 3000–2300 BC, has rules that remain unknown?

Mehen takes its name from a snake god; players probably raced pieces along the coiled body from tail to head, but no ancient account of the rules survives.

In the opening book of Homer's Odyssey, who is found playing a board game outside Odysseus's palace?

Penelope's suitors are at draughts when Athena arrives, sitting on the hides of oxen they have slaughtered from Odysseus's herds, a first glimpse of how they are eating him out of house and home.

In English-language Scrabble, which two letters score the most, ten points each?

Q and Z score ten because Butts priced letters by rarity: the bag holds just one of each, while the nearly as awkward J and X are worth eight.

Which Monopoly property misspells the real place it is named after?

Marvin Gardens should be Marven Gardens: the slip was copied from a homemade board into the published game, and Parker Brothers apologised to the neighbourhood's residents only in 1995.

In WWII, what did Monopoly maker Waddingtons secretly produce for Allied prisoners of war?

Escape maps printed on silk were a Waddingtons job for British intelligence; maps, compasses, files and real money are said to have gone into doctored Monopoly sets, sent through sham relief charities.

By what name was Monopoly's top-hatted mascot originally known?

Rich Uncle Pennybags went nameless on the cards from 1936 until Parker Brothers built a 1946 game, Rich Uncle, around him; in 1999 he was renamed Mr. Monopoly.

Anthony Pratt's 1944 patent application gave his whodunit game what one-word name?

Murder was the title on Pratt's 1944 patent application; the patent came through in 1947, but postwar shortages kept the game out of the shops until 1949.

Which Cluedo suspect's title was swapped for 'Mr.' in the North American version?

Reverend Green, the vicar of British sets, lost his collar in North America, where Mr. Green was first drawn as a businessman with shady connections; the 2023 edition made him a mayor.

Who co-designed the modern Game of Life, introduced in 1960?

Reuben Klamer, working with Bill Markham, created the 1960 Game of Life for Milton Bradley's centenary; TV host Art Linkletter endorsed it and his face appeared on the game's money.

Operation's inventor John Spinello sold his rights to Marvin Glass in 1964 for how much?

$500 and the promise of a job after graduation, which never materialised, was the whole deal for a University of Illinois design student.

With perfect play, Connect Four's first player wins by opening where?

Centre column: it is the only winning start, says Victor Allis, one of two programmers who solved the game within weeks of each other in 1988; open anywhere else and a perfect opponent can at least draw.

Mouse Trap's chain-reaction contraption is built in the style of which cartoonist's absurdly complicated machines?

Rube Goldberg got credit but no money: designer Marvin Glass admitted the debt but refused to pay any licensing or royalty fees.

Which black-and-white strategy game did Goro Hasegawa launch in Japan in 1973?

Othello takes its name from Shakespeare's play: the discs, dark on one side and light on the other, echo the black general and his white wife Desdemona.

Risk was originally released in France in 1957 under what name?

La Conquête du Monde means 'the conquest of the world'; Parker Brothers bought the game, adjusted its rules and relaunched it in 1959 as Risk: The Continental Game.

The first modern chess tournament, held in London in 1851, was organized by which player?

Howard Staunton, then rated the world's best player, organised it only to see the German master Adolf Anderssen win; his name lives on in the standard tournament chess set.

Each backgammon player begins with how many pieces on the board?

Each side has 15 pieces, and the whole contest is a race: the winner is the first to bring all of them round to the home board and bear every one off.

AlphaGo's 4-1 win in Seoul in March 2016 came against which Go champion?

Lee Sedol had predicted a landslide in his own favour; instead he took a single game, in a result DeepMind says came a decade before experts thought a machine could manage it.

FIDE, the world chess federation whose initials stand for a French name, was founded in 1924 in which city?

Paris staged an international team tournament during its 1924 Olympics, and on the final day the players founded FIDE as a kind of union; its motto, Gens una sumus, means 'we are one family'.

A standard mahjong set is typically played with how many tiles?

A standard set has 144 tiles, eight of them flowers and seasons; mahjong grew out of Chinese draw-and-discard card games, which is why it plays so much like rummy.

Jenga takes its name from a Swahili word meaning what?

To build: creator Leslie Scott grew up speaking English and Swahili before developing the game in the 1970s.

A standard Jenga tower is built from how many wooden blocks?

A Jenga set has 54 blocks, stacked three to a layer. They are deliberately made with tiny variations in size, which is why some slide out easily and others are locked tight.

What is the die-rolling dome in the game Trouble called?

The Pop-O-Matic seals the die under a clear bubble that players press to roll it, so it can never get lost; a peg can leave Home only when a six pops up.

Ora and Theo Coster, creators of Guess Who?, ran their Theora Design studio in which country?

Israel was home to Theora Design, though Theo Coster was Dutch-born and moved there only in 1955; fittingly, the game first appeared in Dutch, in 1979, as Wie is het?

Which Lewis Carroll book is plotted as a chess game, with Alice crossing the board as a white pawn?

Through the Looking-Glass opens with a chess diagram promising that the White Pawn, Alice, will win in eleven moves; on reaching the eighth square she is crowned a queen, as any pawn would be.

Which tile-laying game of 2000 gave the hobby the word 'meeple' for its little wooden followers?

Carcassonne's followers became 'meeples' when American player Alison Hansel ran 'my people' together in November 2000; designer Klaus-Jürgen Wrede named the game after the walled French city.

Avalon Hill's catalog advertised Diplomacy as the favourite game of which US president?

John F. Kennedy became the selling point for a game the big firms had turned down: Allan Calhamer had to pay for the first 500 copies himself in 1959.

Robert Angel and partners hand-sorted 500,000 cards to launch which 1985 party game?

Pictionary's printer could not sort the cards a week before launch, so the three partners did it themselves in six days; Angel had sat on the idea until Trivial Pursuit showed him it could work as a boxed game.

Cranium, launched in 1998, was initially sold through which coffee chain?

Starbucks stocked Cranium in its cafés from 1998, a novel route alongside Amazon; founders Whit Alexander and Richard Tait sold the company to Hasbro in 2008.

Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974 by which company?

Tactical Studies Rules existed because nobody else would take the game: unable to find a publisher, Gary Gygax founded the firm with Don Kaye and ran off the first 1,000 copies from his basement.

Dominion, the 2008 game that launched the deck-building genre, was created by whom?

Donald X. Vaccarino stumbled on deck-building in 2006 while working on a different card game, Spirit Warriors II, and built Dominion around the idea instead.

Which game won the first Spiel des Jahres award in 1979?

Hare and Tortoise (Hase und Igel), David Parlett's race game in which carrots are the currency for movement, took the inaugural Spiel des Jahres in 1979 in its Ravensburger edition.

Hasbro's name is a syllabic abbreviation of what original company name?

Hassenfeld Brothers began in 1923 selling textile remnants in Rhode Island, drifted into pencil cases and school supplies, and only then into the toys that made the shortened name famous.

Mastermind is based on which earlier pencil-and-paper game?

Bulls and Cows was a paper code-guessing game; Israeli postmaster Mordecai Meirowitz turned it into pegs in 1970, and after the big toy firms passed, a Leicester plastics company made it a hit.

Yahtzee's most important predecessor is which English dice game?

Yacht gave Yahtzee more than rules: by Hasbro's account, a Canadian couple who played it aboard their boat asked Edwin Lowe to make up sets, and in 1956 he took the rights in return for 1,000 of them.

How long do Boggle players have to find words in the 16-die grid?

Boggle's timer runs for three minutes. Parker Brothers turned Allan Turoff's letter-cube game down at first, then came back for it in 1972 when it wanted a line of word games.

Balderdash was created in Toronto as a boxed version of which classic parlour game?

Fictionary, the parlour game of bluffing dictionary definitions, was the model; Laura Robinson and Paul Toyne replaced the unabridged dictionary with cards of obscure words and real definitions in 1984.

Which card game did Ohio barber Merle Robbins sell in 1972 for $50,000 to a group led by a funeral-parlor owner?

Uno began as the Robbins family's cure for arguments over the rules of Crazy Eights; they paid for the first 5,000 decks themselves and sold them from the barbershop.

In shogi, what may be done with a captured enemy piece?

Return it to play as their own: captured pieces change sides and can be dropped onto almost any empty square, a rule that may echo 15th-century mercenaries who switched lords when captured.

Which New Orleans prodigy crushed Europe's best chess players in 1858, then abandoned competitive play?

Paul Morphy was 21 when he routed the German master Adolf Anderssen; he sailed home in 1859 meaning to practise law, never returned to serious chess and faded from public view.

Titania says 'The nine men's morris is filled up with mud' in which Shakespeare play?

Titania's line comes in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2 Scene 1, in her speech on the disordered seasons; villagers cut nine men's morris boards into turf, so a wet summer could fill them with mud.

HeroQuest (1989) was a Milton Bradley collaboration with which British company?

Games Workshop was designer Stephen Baker's old employer: having moved to Milton Bradley, he went back to it first for plastic miniatures and then for its fantasy know-how.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015) was co-designed by Matt Leacock and whom?

Rob Daviau says the legacy idea began as a joke about why Clue's murderers keep being invited back to dinner; Hasbro passed on a legacy Clue but let him try the format on Risk in 2011.

Isaac Childres raised about $4 million on Kickstarter in 2017 for which dungeon-crawler?

Gloomhaven had started with a far smaller campaign two years earlier, about $386,000; glowing early reviews and two years of growing hype fed the second, which drew more than 40,000 backers.

In Michael Kiesling's tile game Azul, players decorate the palace walls of King Manuel I of which country?

Portugal's Manuel I, the game's story goes, was so dazzled by the Moorish tiles of the Alhambra in Spain that he ordered his own palace covered in azulejos; players are the tile-layers.

Codenames, the 2016 Spiel des Jahres winner, was designed by whom?

Vlaada Chvátil built the game on one tight rule: a spymaster may give a single word as a clue, and a team that touches the assassin card loses on the spot.

Every Blokus piece, like a Tetris block, belongs to which family of shapes?

Polyominoes are squares joined edge to edge: Tetris uses only the four-square kind, while each Blokus colour gets every shape of one to five squares, which is why a player has exactly 21 pieces.

Which tile game did Ephraim Hertzano first make by hand in his backyard?

Rummikub, by its makers' account, was Hertzano's answer to a ban on card-playing in Communist Romania: tiles were not cards. His family later licensed the game around the world.

Which sowing game, called warri in the Caribbean, is counted a national game by Ghana's Ashanti and by Antigua and Barbuda?

Oware's name is said to mean 'he/she marries', after a legend of a couple who wed so that nothing would ever interrupt their game.

Despite its name, Chinese checkers was invented in 1892 in which country?

Germany: it appeared there as Stern-Halma, a star-shaped take on the American game Halma; the 'Chinese' label was a sales pitch dreamed up by the Pressman brothers in the United States in 1928.