Earliest Known Board Games
The oldest known board game with evidence and rules is "The Royal Game of Ur," dating back to approximately 2600-2400 BC. This ancient game was discovered in the form of a surviving board held by the British Museum. The rules were unknown until the 1980s when Professor Irving Finkel translated a cuneiform tablet, allowing for a reconstruction of the basic gameplay [2:1]. Over time, this game evolved slightly across millennia, illustrating how games can adapt and change through cultural exchanges
[2:3].
Development of Role-Playing Elements
Before Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), role-playing elements existed in games like Kriegsspiel, which was developed in 1824 by Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz. Kriegsspiel involved players taking on roles and using a referee to determine outcomes, primarily for military training [4:1]. D&D, emerging in the 1970s, integrated role-play, tabletop gameplay, and dice mechanics into a single collaborative storytelling system, capturing a wide audience due to its innovative combination of these elements
[3:1].
Board Games in the 1960s
The 1960s saw the popularity of several board games that are still recognized today. Games such as "Acquire" (1964), "Dogfight" (1962), "Go For Broke" (1965), and "The Game of Life" (1960) were popular during this period [5:2]. These games often had themes of war or financial success, reflecting societal interests at the time. Avalon Hill was a significant publisher, focusing on hobby games and war-themed titles
[5:7]
[5:8].
Categorization of Board Games
Board games are typically categorized by their mechanics rather than themes. Common categories include worker placement, tableau/engine builders, economic, cooperative, bluffing, roll for movement, and "dudes on a map" [1:3]. Unlike collectible card games (CCGs) and miniature games, traditional board games are self-contained, offering a set list of components and rules without the need for customization
[1:4]
[1:10].
Evolution of Question-Based Card Games
Question-based card games, similar to "Would You Rather" or "Cards Against Humanity," did not gain prominence until the early 1980s with the introduction of "Trivial Pursuit." Before this, games with extensive content represented by cards were limited or nonexistent [5:1].
Hey all! I'm doing a research paper on board games for school and I am laying out broad catagories in the tabletop world.
I typically break gaming in to RPG (pen paper/dnd) CCG/TCG (Mtg, poke,F&B) Miniature (40k) Board Game(idk what to put here)
I think those are the big divisions when I think of gaming as I don't really do rpgs/tcgs/minis. I just "board game" as my tabletop hobby. But how do I describe a "board game" as opposed to the other catagories? I get there's also card gaming (pinnacle/spades/hearts/president) or maybe like casino gaming but how do I explain the "board game" catagory that encompasses most gaming I feel?
Seems like you're basically just trying to capture all the rules-based non-role-playing games that are relatively self-contained, like you buy one box and that's the complete thing (with the possibility for expansions). CCGs/TCGs and miniature games are more so systems that are made to unify a collectible set.
Tbh I don't think there's a great simple one-sentence description of all "board games," like what could you say that unifies everything from Everdell to The Crew to Blood on the Clocktower to Fire in the Lake? I think you could reasonably split that down further into wargaming, economic management games, family games, etc., and argue that those are all just as distinct from one another as they are from Magic or 40k.
I guess I'd recommend investigating your categories a bit more to ask why we shouldn't include Magic in the same category as Wingspan, or why we poker and hearts are distinct from Scythe. If you're not sure, then it sounds like the first step of your project will have to be coming up with a definition that you're comfortable with.
editing to add: you could probably also do a separate category for party games, maybe a category for simulation games (especially war games intended as training exercises), perhaps a category for sort of storytelling-driven games that sort of blur the lines between board games and role-playing games, etc. Long story short, if you're coming into this saying "I want to use these four categories but I'm not sure how to define category 4," maybe the answer is that category 4 doesn't work.
They’re usually broken into groups by their mechanics: Worker placement, tableau/engine builders, economic, Co-operative, bluffing, roll for movement, Dudes on a map. Not sure how granular you’re trying to get
Gotcha. The idea was to be less granular but I feel board gaming is different than the other types I mentioned. I love saying "dudes on a map" tho. Inis, Kemet, GoT2e are great!
The biggest distinction is that this type of game is self-contained (there might be a better term). RPGs require the players and especially the GM to come up with the characters and story. Miniatures games and TCGs let players buy and customize their own armies/decks. Traditional board/card games have a set list of components and rules and that is what you need to play. There may be expansions or errata, but that just changes the parameters from A to B, instead of opening up a door to a wide variety of possibilities. This means that board/card games can be a lot "tighter" and more "elegant" but they lack the variety of other types of tabletop games
Self-Contained is good verbiage. I'm not trying to get even as specific as euro/ameritrash/war.
It would then just be more consistent to group at least "buy a lot of cards" and "buy a lot of minis" games into the same bucket; Warhammer and Magic: The Gathering would be the same kind of game from that lens.
I'd probably turn the question around and ask: What insight do you want to get out of the categorisation?
Because to me it feels that "selfcontained" is only a useful category given the existing other categories. You can as well split the tabletop world up into e.g.:
You can also slice it into "no assembly required, experience of the week" games, and "hone your craft at home" games -- the latter containing probably RPGs, but definitely wargames (build army at home), TCGs (build your deck, metas, blah), probably large box boardgames featuring campaigns. Stuff with progress over time, representing some kind of longer-term commitment vs. "just sit down and go".
Inb4 "but what about one-shots!" -- you can modify a game to match the other category easily enough. It points back to: What are you trying to learn by making up the involved categories?
If you do want to interact with the wider landscape of tabletop hobby experiences, I'll second one of the other commenters, that some research into existing literature would help building a consistent science landscape.
Because of this, people into RPGs, CCGs or miniature games also tend to have one game that they play exclusively, while people into board games have a larger variety of games they play
I think self-contained is as good as you're gonna put it. CCGs and miniature games put an emphasis on building YOUR collection and generally offer more of a framework for players to insert their own personal decks/armies into. Board games offer a set starting point for players to enter.
Did you try looking at boardgamegeek.com's categories?
Also: you could probably also do a separate category for party games, maybe a category for simulation games (especially war games intended as training exercises), perhaps a category for sort of storytelling-driven games that sort of blur the lines between board games and role-playing games, etc. Long story short, if you're coming into this saying "I want to use these four categories but I'm not sure how to define category 4," maybe the answer is that category 4 doesn't work.
(edited this to the above comment but wanted to make sure you saw it)
Does "school" in this case mean high school or university?
Assuming this is for a university assignment, you should probably start by searching your university library database for academic books on board game studies/analog(ue) game studies/roleplaying game studies, or so on. Most of them probably give some kind of overview of the range of game types around, and that might give you a good place to start, and something that you can cite in your assignment!
This is what I would want my students to do.
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While there may have been older games that have been lost to time and memory entirely, the oldest one we have evidence and rules for is The Royal Game of Ur, circa 2600-2400 BC or so. That date is an estimate based on a surviving board that is now held by the British Museum. The rules remained unknown for a long time until the 1980s, when professor Irving Finkel at the museum translated a slightly younger cuniform tablet and from there, was able to reconstruction the basic rules. Finkel himself is still around and has even made youtube videos about how the game is played. He's quite entertaining watch, in that slightly mad professor/possible-immortal-wizard sort of way.
Board games have a kind of taxonomy based on their various rule designs. This is touched upon in great detail in notable game historian David Parlett's History of Board Games. While this is not an exact science, it's generally agreed that the Game of Ur belongs to the "tables" game family. This is the same family as backgammon, in that in involves each player having multiple pieces which advance around a course via roll of the dice, with the strategy being which piece to move, and having the mechanic of bumping the opposing player's pieces off by landing on them. There are numerous evolutions of this concept, with Tabula during the Greek and Roman times, Nard in ancient Persia, numerous variations in the Middle Ages which are documented in the 13th century Spanish book Libro de Lose Juegos, and eventually Backgammon around about the 17th century.
Is the 2600 BC the date of the artefact or the estimated creation date of the game?
Also, do we know when it stopped being played?
It's the date of the artifact. It's entirely possible it (or some variant) was invented earlier, but this is our oldest piece of evidence that has been matched to working rules.
When it stopped being played is not as straightforward to answer, because it changed a little bit at a time over the millennia. This paper traces the details of how it was distributed and changed, based on available evidence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440312004955
Thank you for the book recommendation. Just ordered it!
Dungeons & Dragons is often credited as the first game to combine these three elements:
D&D was the first game to integrate them into a single, open-ended system of collaborative storytelling. But whatwere the historical precedents of games or activities that combined some or all of these elements before D&D, and why did this combination (role-play + tabletop strategy + dice) succeed in capturing such a wide and lasting audience in the 1970s?
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There are a few previously answered questions with answers that relate to (but do not fully answer) your question:
Notably, the first of these answers references the source Playing at the World, which is a comprehensive book (two volumes, as of its latest edition) covering the history behind the creation of D&D and the historical context surrounding its initial release. If a proper response to your question does not materialize here, that book would likely be the next best place to look.
I was tryifn to find the first table top rpg game and from what I gathered, there wasn't anything of such kind up until 1950's. This is bizzare, because we have known storytelling for countless millenias and the oldest dice are at least 3 000 years old. If we consider chess to be the first miniature war game (which is actually rather unlikely, there might be older ones), then the transition from that to ttprpg still took us 1500 years.
How come so? Telling a story and rolling a die to determine the outcome doesn't seem that complex of an idea. Why didn't we do it until relatively recently?
Some earlier posts about D&D you might enjoy, but I suppose more could be written:
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There are a number of games prior to Dungeons and Dragons which involved playing roles and working with a referee to determine outcomes. The most prominent is Kriegsspiel, revised by Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz from his father's wargaming rules in 1824.
After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire due to the invasions of Napoleon, the general staff of the Prussian army sought out radical new techniques to train officers and soldiers. George Leopold von Reisswitz elaborated on the traditional exercises of chess by creating a new game which relied on the new science of military statistics to determine the outcome of military conflicts in a wholly deterministic, stochastic manner. His son adapted the rules of Kriegsspiel based on his war experience by adding the element of chance through dice, and imperfect information managed by a referee.
When Prussia defeated Austria and France convincingly in the 19th century, other European powers became incredibly interested in their military sciences and the new wargames. The American Charles A Totten published an American adaptation of Kriegsspiel, which added a 12 sided randomizer, and more focus on logistics to the rules.
In the 1960s, David Wesley, the undercredited third creator of tabletop role-playing wrote a new edition of Strategos, making the game simpler and more accessible. The game's principles were applied to political scenarios based on American military conflicts in Latin America during the Cold War, leading to the creation of Braunstein, by some accounts, the first tabletop RPG. Leaving for the military during the Vietnam War, David Wesley gave his friend Dave Arneson permission to develop the game, which led to D&D
So the reason tabletop role-playing most likely wasn't invented earlier was because of its links to statistical science, military conflicts, mass media, and cross cultural adaptation. Several of these things have existed at various points in history, but all of them haven't been present except in the 1960s.
A good resource for the development of RPGs is the elusive shift, by Jon Peterson, the most prominent historian of RPGs.
I don’t think you can really call Braunstein a tabletop RPG. It’s much more of a LARP.
Braunstein wasn't originally written with private meetings and use of physical space in mind. David Wesley was quite surprised that players started walking off to play their characters instead of sitting at the table and participating as a group.
That's more due to doing something that hadn't been attempted before. Wesley also neglected to include rules for personal combat in Braunstein I despite two characters' victory conditions being based on winning a duel.
Braunstein 2 had much more detailed character abilities and rules to keep the players playing a tabletop game and keeping them from larping. (However, Dave Arneson still broke the game wide open by creating an elaborate character backstory and drawing other players into his creative vision)
Additionally, were question based card games (similar in the vein of would you rather or cards against humanity) around during that period?
These are some of the games my dad played in the 60s/70s that he either kept or repurchased on ebay to play with me when I was younger:
They're all war-themed or about getting the most money (Go For Broke is about being the first to spend all of your money). Those kinds of games were popular at the time, but they're also both things my dad is interested in as an adult: I couldn't tell you offhand whether there are other games he played and lost interest in.
Here are a few others that my father had had:
• Diplomacy (1959)
• Twixt (1962)
• Stocks & Bonds (1964)
Wasn't Aquire a 3M game?
And dog fight....was that a card based game of arial combat? If so, I remember playing a friend's copy in the 80's
I grew up playing Game of Life, Stratego and Risk.
Acquire was a 3M game, but then Avalon Hill, ahem, acquired 3M's board game division.
Acquire is great and it's a shame it isn't as popular as the three big popular ones on your list.
>Acquire (1964)
I came here to post this game. Sid Sackson showed up with Acquire in the 1960s, and it's still an awesome game today.
This will generally depend on the region. “Hobby” games were quite a bit more niche at that time with stuff like war games and the 3m bookshelf series.
Generally in the mass market you had the standard Parker brothers games such as monopoly.
Though if you actually looked at total games played card games like hearts or bridge would likely be the most popular.
I was a teen in the 60s and I remember playing Monopoly, Risk, Game of Life, Careers, Scrabble. But we played a lot more card games then than we did boardgames. Pinochle was probably the favorite, but we played almost anything that was in Hoyle.
In the 60 ’s, for me it was all Avalon Hill. Whatever new came out one of my group would snag it. If you never played Jutland on a living room floor, you don’t know what you missed. I even knew a guy who built waterline models of every ship out of wood.
“ My destroyer group suddenly appears from under the ottoman!”
I didn't start gaming until '72, but AH was the only game in town. Started on Kriegspiel, then Blitzkrieg. Wooden Ships and Iron Men was the first thing I bought for myself with my own money.
I just bought gunslinger and Blackbeard. Awesome games.
Games with a large stack of “content” represented by a box of cards that you worked your way through over many, many games were a new concept in the early 80s, with Trivial Pursuit leading the way. There may have been question-based games before that using books, but I would guess that in the 60s the sort of games you are asking about were either extremely limited in the amount of content they offered, or didn’t exist.
I made a board and have played quite a bit. It's a great game and when you add in the variations it's quite strategic. Best thing about it is you can make a board out of just about anything, which is the obvious appeal. Some scratches on the ground, some stones and a couple coins or flat sticks and you have a board.
Same here, I’ve built and played a lot of Ur, and it’s a fantastic game with quite in-depth strategy, but the matches can take a sweet while to finish, which has scared off a few of my first time players
I love this game!
I thought the royal game of Ur was the oldest...
What about Mancala🤔
I believe there are disputed claims, but it's very possible. Both games probably existed far earlier than "the oldest ones found" anyway.
Shouldn't the title then say, one of the oldest rather than mislead by saying the oldest
We don’t actually know the rules for sure. A partial set of written rules has been found and they extrapolated the rest.
You are absolutely correct, but the version shown in the video looks fun nonetheless.
There's an online version that I found quite addictive:
Awesome, thank you for this.
I have played, and lost, this exact copy of the game. Can confirm that it’s fun!
Fascinating! Watched the whole thing.
Are there any documentaries about board games/role playing/war games, their history, and/or their relationship with video games? I would like it/them to start somewhere in the mid to late 1800s and end around the late 1900s. It doesn’t have to be one movie, it can be a series or a collection of otherwise unrelated videos or films.
I know the big one is Dungeons and Dragons but it didn’t exist in a vacuum and wasn’t divinely inspired.
Thank you in advance.
Video games in the 1800s? Did i shift fimensions or what did i miss?
Board games from the 1800s and their relationship to video games from the 1900s
This is relatively short and doesn't go into everything you're interested in but it's a decent start https://youtu.be/Gov-qrjvOTc
You might enjoy the book Playing at the World but it's a book, not a film.
Funny. It looks exactly like the game of Ur
Amazing to think they had colour photography, they really were an advanced civilisation.
The words chess and thus checkmate go back to Persian shah mat (the king is caught), in that sense an Egyptian game can not be the "original checkmate". The mechanisms are also better compared to Pachisi or Backgammon.
Incredible. A board game. 3300 years ago.
I wonder if it was played similar to Mancala?
Thanks. and I try to find out How to play. very interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeLAfm1bx3U&ab_channel=TripleSGames
This is so cool. Thanks for posting
Senet is an ancient Egyptian board game. Its full ancient name was senet net hab, which means ‘game of passing through’; this is because the aim of the game is to get from one end of the board to the other.
The first definite appearance of this game comes from the Third Dynasty (c. 2670 –2613 BCE) and the earliest boards we have come from the Middle Kingdom (c.2000 –1600 BCE). This game was played and enjoyed by commoners and nobles alike, the only difference being the materials used to make the boards and pieces. King Tutankhamun was buried with four senet boards made of precious materials, like ebony wood, and ivory, but less expensive boards were made of a pottery-like material called faience, orstone or simply scratched in dirt.
Initially, it was just a fun game, but from the 19th Dynasty (c.1292 BCE) on it took on religious significance. The ancient Egyptians thought that the pieces journeying across the board was like the soul passing through the underworld to get to the afterlife. Unfortunately, the rules of this game have not survived and we can only make educated guesses about how it was played.
history of board games
Key Considerations in the History of Board Games:
Ancient Origins:
Cultural Significance:
Evolution Through Time:
Modern Era:
Digital Influence:
Takeaways:
Recommendation: If you're interested in exploring board games, consider starting with classics like Chess or Go, and then branch out to modern games like Catan or Carcassonne to experience the evolution of gameplay and strategy.
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