Board Game History
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94 free Board Game History trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
13 free board game history trivia questions with answers. Think you know board game history? Test your knowledge with our exciting 94-question trivia quiz covering everything from ancient games to modern classics. Whether you're a casual player or a dedicated board game enthusiast, this quiz will challenge what you know about the games we love.
30 of 94 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Egyptian board game is often cited as one of the world's oldest?
Senet
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.
Q 02Which British archaeologist rediscovered the Royal Game of Ur while excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur?
Leonard Woolley
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.
Q 03Which family of 'sowing and counting' board games takes its name from an Arabic word meaning 'to move'?
Mancala
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.
Q 04The game of chess is believed to have originated from an ancient game called Chaturanga in which country?
India
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.
Q 05Which ancient Chinese board game was one of the 'Four Arts' of the cultured gentleman?
Go
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.
Q 06Shahr-e Sukhteh, the 'Burnt City' where a Bronze Age board game was found complete with its dice, is in which country?
Iran
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.
Q 07The modern board game Ludo is a simplified version of which ancient Indian cross-and-circle game?
Pachisi
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.
Q 08Which 5x5-grid game is considered a direct ancestor of modern checkers (draughts)?
Alquerque
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.
Q 09Monopoly descends from which game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904?
The Landlord's Game
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.
Q 10Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts had trained and worked in which profession before losing his job in the early 1930s?
Architect
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.
Q 11Anthony E. Pratt dreamed up Cluedo while sheltering from wartime air raids in which city in the English Midlands?
Birmingham
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.
Q 12Trivial Pursuit, devised by two newspapermen in 1979, comes from which country?
Canada
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.
Q 13Which 1995 Klaus Teuber title was among the first Eurogames to catch on outside Europe?
Catan
Q 21Who claimed the title of first universally recognised World Chess Champion in 1886?
Wilhelm Steinitz
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.
Q 22In 1997, which IBM computer became the first to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a match?
Deep Blue
Deep Blue had lost to Kasparov the year before; IBM retired the machine after the rematch.
Q 23What is the highest number shown on a standard backgammon doubling cube?
64
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.
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.
Q 14The properties on the original Monopoly board were named after locations in and around which place?
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City, New Jersey, got there via Quaker players who renamed the streets on Lizzie Magie's earlier game to match their town.
Q 15Elizabeth Magie designed her 1904 realty game to teach the economic ideas of which American thinker?
Henry George
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.
Q 16The 12th-century Lewis chessmen, found on a Scottish island in 1831, are mostly carved from which material?
Walrus ivory
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.
Q 17The Royal Game of Ur survived into the 1950s only among the Jewish community of which Indian city?
Kochi
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.
Q 18Which British Museum curator reconstructed the rules of the Royal Game of Ur from a cuneiform tablet?
Irving Finkel
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.
Q 19Who beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 in the chess showdown dubbed the Match of the Century?
Bobby Fischer
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.
Q 20In Go, what are the points added to White's score to compensate for moving second called?
Komi
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.
Q 24Backgammon gained its doubling cube in 1920s gaming clubs in which country?
America
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.
Q 25What did Alfred Butts call his board-and-tiles word game before it was renamed Scrabble?
Criss-Crosswords
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.
Q 26How many tiles are in an English-language Scrabble set?
100
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.
Q 27Hnefatafl, a game of a king escaping his besiegers, was carried across northern Europe by which seafarers before chess displaced it?
The Vikings
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.
Q 28Cluedo's name blends 'clue' with 'ludo', Latin for what?
I play
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.
Q 29What did Milton Bradley's 1860 Checkered Game of Life use in place of dice, then tainted by gambling?
A spinning top
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.
Q 30Risk was invented in 1957 by which French film director?
Albert Lamorisse
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.