The Travellers' Tour Through the United States
August 9, 2024 5:19 PM Subscribe
Matthew Wynn Sivils (The Conversation, 05/08/2024), "What America's first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation": "'The Travellers' Tour' first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S. But for almost a century another game held that honor ... 'The Mansion of Happiness,' an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843 ... Announcing itself as a 'pleasing and instructive pastime,' 'The Travellers' Tour' consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities." Scan available at the LOC.
Educational geography games have a long history in Europe, e.g. Cartes pour apprendre la géographie, set 1 and set 2 (1751); Les Jeux des cartes des roys de France, des reines renommées, de la géographie et des fables (1662; but beginning 1644; with partial copies from 1664 and partial but especially good reproductions from 1698); Jeu d'armoiries de l'Europe, pour apprendre le blason, la géographie, et l'histoire curieuse (1659; but also 1660, 1665, and in Italian and German editions from 1694 and 1695; plus actual cards covering heraldry); and Jeu géographique des quatre parties du monde (ca. 1600-1625).
More cards from didactic games are available at Gallica thanks to their Cartes à jouer collections, and Yale has made available a copy of the similar Astronomische kartenspiel (1674) by prolific parlor game author / compiler Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, whose parlor game manuals preserved an early storytelling game and the earliest German opera with surviving music, Seelewig. Also, previously on Metafilter, multiple dissertations provide overviews of religious instruction in Buddhist board games, sometimes including sacred geographies and other geographic features.
Before 1843, commercial printing of games in the United States also included collections of parlor games for children, e.g. Eliza Leslie's illustrated American Girls' Book in 1831 with games such as the Mad Libs-like game "The Newspaper" and the novelist Lydia Maria Child's The Girls' Own Book in 1833 with its fairy tale "The Palace of Beauty" and its game of "Buz!" familiar to modern software developers as "FizzBuzz" (although 'fizz' appears later than 'buzz,' in a footnote). Meanwhile, traditional parlor games played by adults, e.g. in Virginia in 1773 or Alabama in 1836, involved a significant amount of kissing.
Lydia Maria Child's 1833 parlor game text also describes board games similar to "The Traveller's Tour," including a board game she calls the "Geographical Game" and a list of other "attractive or useful" games played with teetotums like "The Traveller's Tour": "The Polite Tourist ... The Parlour Traveller," etc. But parlor games addressing the themes of "The Traveller's Tour" were also common, e.g. Eliza Leslie's "The Traveller" in 1831 or the complex of storytelling, travel details / geography trivia, and musical chairs games that includes "Die Reise nach Jerusalem" (1798), "Le Voyage du Capucin" (1801), "The Traveller's Tour" (1858), "Stage-Coach" (1867), "Stage Coach / Going to Jerusalem" (1890), and "Family Coach" (1907).
Educational geography games have a long history in Europe, e.g. Cartes pour apprendre la géographie, set 1 and set 2 (1751); Les Jeux des cartes des roys de France, des reines renommées, de la géographie et des fables (1662; but beginning 1644; with partial copies from 1664 and partial but especially good reproductions from 1698); Jeu d'armoiries de l'Europe, pour apprendre le blason, la géographie, et l'histoire curieuse (1659; but also 1660, 1665, and in Italian and German editions from 1694 and 1695; plus actual cards covering heraldry); and Jeu géographique des quatre parties du monde (ca. 1600-1625).
More cards from didactic games are available at Gallica thanks to their Cartes à jouer collections, and Yale has made available a copy of the similar Astronomische kartenspiel (1674) by prolific parlor game author / compiler Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, whose parlor game manuals preserved an early storytelling game and the earliest German opera with surviving music, Seelewig. Also, previously on Metafilter, multiple dissertations provide overviews of religious instruction in Buddhist board games, sometimes including sacred geographies and other geographic features.
Before 1843, commercial printing of games in the United States also included collections of parlor games for children, e.g. Eliza Leslie's illustrated American Girls' Book in 1831 with games such as the Mad Libs-like game "The Newspaper" and the novelist Lydia Maria Child's The Girls' Own Book in 1833 with its fairy tale "The Palace of Beauty" and its game of "Buz!" familiar to modern software developers as "FizzBuzz" (although 'fizz' appears later than 'buzz,' in a footnote). Meanwhile, traditional parlor games played by adults, e.g. in Virginia in 1773 or Alabama in 1836, involved a significant amount of kissing.
Lydia Maria Child's 1833 parlor game text also describes board games similar to "The Traveller's Tour," including a board game she calls the "Geographical Game" and a list of other "attractive or useful" games played with teetotums like "The Traveller's Tour": "The Polite Tourist ... The Parlour Traveller," etc. But parlor games addressing the themes of "The Traveller's Tour" were also common, e.g. Eliza Leslie's "The Traveller" in 1831 or the complex of storytelling, travel details / geography trivia, and musical chairs games that includes "Die Reise nach Jerusalem" (1798), "Le Voyage du Capucin" (1801), "The Traveller's Tour" (1858), "Stage-Coach" (1867), "Stage Coach / Going to Jerusalem" (1890), and "Family Coach" (1907).
This is really neat, thanks Wobbuffet! As a New Jerseyan and a geographer, I have to point out that Trenton is placed a bit too far north on that map, and I'm really wondering why Bridgeton, NJ, is on the map at all!
posted by mollweide at 5:51 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
posted by mollweide at 5:51 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
The Mansion of Happiness sounds like a great Call of Cthulhu expansion adventure.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:11 PM on August 9 [3 favorites]
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:11 PM on August 9 [3 favorites]
Canandaigua does *indeed* evince a considerable degree of elegance! Such a cool post, Wobbuffet, with treasure-troves of other links to dig into later. Flagged as fantastic.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:17 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:17 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
Geographical niceties, is it? I've just finished Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers by Paulina Rowińska. There's a chapter on the shape of Colorado [hint: not a quadrilateral, no sirree]. The borders of Colorado were agreed and defined (with a great sweeping gesture on a desk in DC) by the US Congress on 28 Feb 1861 as a box between 37° and 41° N and 25° and 32° W. Rowińska doesn't clarify that the Westings of Colorado are from Washington (nor does Congress specify where in DC is the start point). If we take those measures from the Greenwich meridian, the Colorado rectangle almost exactly comprehends the entire Azorean archipelago 36.5°–40° N & 24.5°–31.5° W. If aliens set their landing coordinates on Greenwich (as intergalactic visitors might) they'd find that "Colorado" was unexpectedly a) flat and b) plooosh!
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:35 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:35 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
Mod note: [Greetings, fellow travelers! The word on the road is that this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog! See you in New Orleans!]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:22 AM on August 10 [5 favorites]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:22 AM on August 10 [5 favorites]
Ahhhhh, this is amazing! Thank you, Wobbuffet. If ever there were a case for print-on-demand games suppliers...
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:39 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:39 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
The Mansion of Happiness sounds like a great Call of Cthulhu expansion adventure.
And all go stumbling through that house
in lonely secrecy
Saying "Do reveal yourself"
or "Why has thou forsaken me?"
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 6:25 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
And all go stumbling through that house
in lonely secrecy
Saying "Do reveal yourself"
or "Why has thou forsaken me?"
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 6:25 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
#124, with no mention of Lambeau Field.
posted by gimonca at 8:59 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
posted by gimonca at 8:59 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
Incidentally, looking over this article again, it mentions how "'The Travellers' Tour Through the United States' was an imitation of earlier European geography games," and it links to this page with a couple of interesting examples. But that's a pretty incomplete source, omitting very similar and earlier games even just in English, e.g. ...
- A Journey Through Europe or The Play of Geography (1759), which has a better scan in an overview article by Adrian Seville, "The geographical Jeux de l'Oie of Europe"
- The Royal Geographical Pastime or the complete Tour of Europe (1768)
- The Royal Geographical Pastime: Exhibiting a Complete Tour Round The World (1770; scan with transcribed locations)--explained in these links by by Holly Brewer, a historian who uses the game in her classes
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I love that the Library of Congress has things like this, and that it's so easy to zoom way in on those instructions and read them.
And how mind-blowing to see that Chicago is not even on the map (of course it's not, because it incorporated 15 years after The Travellers' Tour appeared).
There is so much delightful stuff to dig into here. I will be coming back to this post for weeks to come.
Thank you so much for crafting this wonderful post, Wobuffet! It's really great.
posted by kristi at 5:37 PM on August 9 [7 favorites]