“How about a nice game of chess?”

February 17, 2020 10:53 AM

The Best Board Games of the Ancient World [Smithsonian Magazine] “Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. From Go to backgammon, Nine Men’s Morris and mancala, these were the cutthroat, quirky and surprisingly spiritual board games of the ancient world.”

• Scientists Are Discovering Long-Lost Rules for Ancient Board Games [Vice][Digital Ludeme Project]

“Humans have played games for millenia, and the oldest known board game is an Egyptian game that dates back to 3100 BCE called Senet. “We almost never have the rules for these early games,” Browne said. “The rules have never been recorded, so our knowledge is largely based on historian’s reconstructions.” Browne is the principal investigator of the Digital Ludeme Project, a research project based at Maastricht University in the Netherlands that’s using computational techniques to recreate the rules of ancient board games. To assist in this work, Browne and his colleagues are working on a general-purpose system for modelling ancient games, as well as generating plausible rulesets and evaluating them. The system is called Ludii, and it implements computational techniques from the world of genetics research and artificial intelligence.”

• What we learn from one of the world's oldest board games [The New Yorker]

“There is something touchingly human in the dispersal of these games—in the vision it evokes of travellers packing for long, hard journeys and remembering to take with them something to kill time, something to satisfy their impulse to play. Anthropologists often regard these old games as novelties, Crist told me, but they can narrate plenty about their era. “Games function socially as a way for people to interact with one another,” he said. “People will play games when they vaguely know each other, to get to know one another.” The anthropologist Thomas M. Malaby, in a 2007 paper, recounted how, while studying gambling in Greece, he improved at backgammon. To the Cretans he played against, he wrote, “the potential meaning of the outcomes broadened, reflecting any of a number of new possibilities (e.g., ‘You’ve become Greek, now!’ or ‘The clever American must have found a new way to cheat’).” The ability to judge another person was valuable, Crist said. It helped find answers to important questions: Are you good enough to be part of my family? Should I trust you enough to trade with you? “This is how games passed between cultures,” Crist said. Where language cannot reveal everything, something may still be gleaned from the silent, ludic routines of a game.”

posted by Fizz (29 comments total)

Previously on the Royal Game of Ur: 5.6 on boardgamegeek. Learn to play!
posted by zengargoyle at 11:23 AM on February 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

“How about a nice game of chess?”

Bah...fooey!
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:06 PM on February 17, 2020

Talking of Hnefatafl, archaeologists on Lindisfarne have just discovered a 1200-year-old glass 'king' piece from the game, dating back to the time of the Viking invasion:

“Many people will be familiar with Viking versions of the game, and I’m sure plenty of people will wonder whether this gaming piece was dropped by a Viking during the attack on Lindisfarne, but we believe it actually belonged to a version of the game that was played by the elites of Northern Britain before the Vikings ever set foot here,” said Lisa Westcott Wilkins, Managing Director of DigVentures.

“It’s amazing to think that when the Vikings did land here they could, in theory, have sat down with the monks of Lindisfarne to play a game that would have been familiar to both cultures, although they would almost certainly have argued over whose rules to play by!”

More on the discovery from the Guardian, plus a 3D model of the piece.
posted by verstegan at 12:09 PM on February 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have parlor mancala. Rules says it is the oldest known game. Yeah, it is hard.

I wonder what a version of Stratego® would have looked like in 400 B.C.E.
posted by clavdivs at 12:42 PM on February 17, 2020

Thousands of years from now, some future archaeologist is going to find somebody's fully painted Warhammer 40K army and end up spending their entire career trying to reconstruct the frankly bonkers mythology and deciphering what any of it meant in the context of late 20th century/early 21st century culture. I'm afraid they'll conclude that some of us had way too much time on our hands.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:19 PM on February 17, 2020 [15 favorites]

From the Vice article:

To assist in this work, Browne and his colleagues are working on a general-purpose system for modelling ancient games, as well as generating plausible rulesets and evaluating them...

While the games are imperfect, the idea is that computers can help scientists narrow down which plausible iterations of ancient games are more fun to play, and thus more likely to have existed in reality.

This approach doesn't seem to make much sense if the goal is to try and discern what the rules of ancient games actually were. The premises seem hopelessly flawed. The article didn't say, and I can't open the project site where I am right now, but have they tried confirming this method first by having the system generate rulesets for existing known games to check if the results are anywhere in the ballpark of the actual game? If you gave it a chessboard and chess pieces, for example, would it spit out something near what the rules of chess actually are? I feel like "plausible" and "fun to play" will yield all kinds of possible games that aren't anything like the correct answer.

The article says:

This approach has already found some success. In 2018, archaeologists discovered an ancient Roman board game in a tomb in Slovakia. Piecing together the rules of the game has proved an impossible task for researchers, but Browne and his researchers have a version of the game you can play right now.

But a "success" would be somehow confirming that rules of an ancient game created by this system are (or are near) the actual rules. This is just making up rules that work.
posted by the legendary esquilax at 1:23 PM on February 17, 2020 [7 favorites]

See also Yavalath, which is a game designed by the same system that's searching for plausible rules for these older games (previously).
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:34 PM on February 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm certainly not the first to say it, but I'm often struck by how much knowledge has been lost because people just never bothered to record ordinary stuff. If every other Madonna were actually a realistic street scene, we'd have so much more information about early Europe than we do now. If Pliny The Elder had devoted just one his volumes to board game rules, rather than batshit crazy speculative science that isn't true, half of these would be solved problems.

Assuming our data survives our civilization, it's not unlikely the blurry yelp photographs of physical menus will be more interesting to future generations than any of our best-selling novels.

I also wonder how closely tied these games were to gambling. I want to believe they weren't, 'cause play itself is engaging. But, that's probably naive. I've got nothing against gambling in particular. It just seems less fun than play for the sake of play. (I'm still bitter that someone explained to me that fantasy football was actually all about gambling. I liked imagining sports fans playing incomprehensible games just for the sheer joy of it.)
posted by eotvos at 1:36 PM on February 17, 2020 [9 favorites]

Readers of this FPP may enjoy Iain Banks' The Player of Games, an SF story that revolves around games, their uses and significance. Banks gives us the main character's views on games and mentions some interesting possible mechanics. One of those sounded especially intriguing to me: players can "lock in" a future move, hidden from their opponents, which may or may not pay off later. I think it's an intriguing mechanic that could be usefully implemented in all sorts of games.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:55 PM on February 17, 2020 [7 favorites]

Hunh. A friend of mine is no slouch when it comes to games (a published designer several times over) and I just introduced him to Senet a week ago. I have been putting it off but I thought after fifty centuries it was high time.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:57 PM on February 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

One of those sounded especially intriguing to me: players can "lock in" a future move, hidden from their opponents, which may or may not pay off later.

Before Richard Garfield did, y’know, Magic, he designed Roborally, in which if things go badly amiss enough, you may find any number of your moves locked in.

It does not always pay off for you.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:59 PM on February 17, 2020 [6 favorites]

It almost never pays off for you, you mean...

Move 1 - Into the pit
posted by Windopaene at 2:19 PM on February 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

Most people can't play modern games properly with the instructions included right in the box.

I can't imagine the arguments we'd get into over whether or not you get the Pharaoh's Tomb money if you land on the Great Pyramid.
posted by madajb at 2:58 PM on February 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

If I had to guess, one of the reasons Senet's rules aren't written down is probably for the same reason Monopoly has so many localized house rules like Free Parking lotteries and abandoning property auctions: there may never have been a definite set of rules, but rather everyone had their own variation of it. No one could write down "the" rules to Senet, because there may never have been a single official way to play.

All of the above, of course, is Internet Person Speculation. But I find it instructive how few people, while I was growing up, actually played Monopoly by its official, printed-right-there-in-the-box rules, and how someone I knew even in college was wholly ignorant of the "real" way to play it, and in fact piled in so many alternate rules that it was pretty much an entirely different game.
posted by JHarris at 3:06 PM on February 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

In 2018, archaeologists discovered an ancient Roman board game in a tomb in Slovakia.

I always feel melancholy when I read about objects found in old tombs, presumably beloved by their owners, and left with the dead that found joy in them in life. Time is cruel, and death is terrible.

When they try to play that game, you can bet there's an ancient Roman ghost hovering behind them saying "You're doing this entirely wrong."
posted by JHarris at 3:11 PM on February 17, 2020 [9 favorites]

If I had to guess, one of the reasons Senet's rules aren't written down is probably for the same reason Monopoly has so many localized house rules like Free Parking lotteries

I like to imagine friends and siblings 3000 years ago getting into arguments about "That's not in the rules!" "That's how we always play!" "This is why these games always take forever!" People were ever only people.
posted by the legendary esquilax at 3:57 PM on February 17, 2020 [10 favorites]

There was a nice bit in Britain's Viking Graveyard where they went over a prospective site near Derbyshire and found the characteristic little lead thimble-shaped objects that meant Viking boardgamers had been there, "This was probably a winter encampment; in their down time they were casting (and losing) these little lead gaming pieces."
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:54 PM on February 17, 2020

In the 1980s I had a Senet game that my grandmother had bought from a museum gift shop. I then wrote an Apple ][ computer game based on it and entered it into a contest run by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium, makers of Oregon Trail.) Somewhere I have a plaque that I won for it.
posted by larrybob at 8:41 PM on February 17, 2020 [6 favorites]

The late John M. Ford (previously), in his Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, has a character talk about the games of various species. The primary Romulan game is called latrunculo. And now I know where the name, quite logically, came from.
posted by bryon at 10:14 PM on February 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

somebody's fully painted Warhammer 40K army and end up spending their entire career trying to reconstruct

Yeah, yeah. I thought the same about dudes who had claylike armies in his tomb or, tin solders, artifacts like dice and underground maps seemingly accompanied by the same books on rules and mythic creatures.

These will be found in the fifth tier of a New Jersey mansion near the washed up Statue of Liberty.
posted by clavdivs at 1:28 AM on February 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I had things to do today Fizz. I really did.
posted by jquinby at 5:39 AM on February 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Go may be ancient but by golly it still is popular, difficult, and complex. It is a game that rewarded two years of study. It felt like climbing a ladder of techniques where I slowly learned a new strategy, and then used that strategy to win, and then learned my strategy had a known (but complex) counter attack, and learned that counter attack. Slowly earning higher ranks.

It felt like learning life. Learning to see things more complexly. Learning to let go of old ideas and old mistakes.
posted by rebent at 7:07 AM on February 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is definitely the best of the web!

But I'm a little sad they didn't include one of my faves, Bagh Chal.
posted by solotoro at 8:24 AM on February 18, 2020

Love articles. Thank you.
posted by doctornemo at 10:09 AM on February 18, 2020

When we were kids my brother and I built a senet set, with help from our father. We were proud of the physical result, but the game was really not a lot of fun.
posted by doctornemo at 10:09 AM on February 18, 2020

I'd like to emphasize that, despite what some people may have said or trademarked, no one living really knows how senet was played. Rules that you might have played by are all conjecture, recreations based on fragments, collected from a variety of relics dating to different times, over which it's likely they changed.
posted by JHarris at 8:19 PM on February 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

There's an Oxford History of Board Games, a neat, little pocketable hardback by David Parlett. I cannot recommend it enough. Skill games vs. luck games vs a healthy blend, randomizers from polyhedral dice to tossed sticks to a tile suite hundreds of characters large, race games vs. capture games to contemporary sculpture styles, it's all so exciting. Sometimes you can add a little seasoning with a friendly (or in earnest) wager or two...

FAIRY CHESS. Just - fairy chess is a thing you should know about.

There are innumerable complete and whole grave-goods of Liubo, as in every big-wig was playing it in ancient China for a long, long time... and we have no idea what the rules were.

I love board games. I'm just not terribly good at any of them.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:05 PM on February 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I just finished reading the description of all those ancient games from the first link and it's probably cliched but I can't help but think of the William Burroughs quotation:

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
posted by GalaxieFiveHundred at 9:14 PM on February 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'd like to emphasize that, despite what some people may have said or trademarked, no one living really knows how senet was played. Rules that you might have played by are all conjecture, recreations based on fragments, collected from a variety of relics dating to different times, over which it's likely they changed.

This is also weirdly true of Monopoly, but it does not prevent a thousand reskinnings of the game from cluttering shelves everywhere.

Monopoly, I mean.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:52 PM on February 25, 2020 [1 favorite]