history of board games | 2015-12-23

around 3500 BC, egyptians were playing senet and would bury people with senet boards (cuz they like to bury people with things) — this game is still around today.

around the 4th century, in china, they started to play ‘go‘, which is super fun and you can play today as well — it’s deceptively complex (figures…).

around the 5th century, in europe, tafl was played by the vikings as they raided around everywhere — you know, a little raping, a little pillaging, maybe some board games…

around the 6th century, tafl got punted over to india and became chaturanga, which started to look a lot like modern day chess.

and, once chess became chess, it more or less has stayed that way and people still play it. (username = permafrown if you fancy a game)

around the 8th century, in north east africa, people began play mancala, which, is still played today, as well.

from there, board games stayed roughly the same until in 1903 when lizzie magie invented ‘the landlord’s game‘. she sold off the patent to parker brother’s in 1935 (i’ll bet you can figure out what they renamed the game to).

parker brothers went on to create a lot of games (risk; sorry; trivial pursuit) and to start a revolution of in-a-box-with-a-board-and-some-pieces games.

in 1978, the ‘spiel des jahres’ competition started in germany, awarding the first prize in 1979 to david parlett for ‘hare and tortoise‘ — go, dave, go.

then, in 1995, a certain man by the name of klaus teuber offered up what would be the spiel des jahres winner that year:

after ‘catan’ won the prize, it did something that no parker brothers style game had really done before then — it went international! people all over the world started paying attention to these funny germans and their game of the year awards.

BOOM! board games started to come outta the woodwork!

right now, you can go on kickstarter and fund all kinds of new board games and some people have found tremendous success this way. e.g.:

“The Conan board game Kickstarter campaign launched on January 12th 2015 with a hefty goal of $80,000. It received full funding within 5 minutes and 37 seconds. Not only that, it went on to raise a total of $3,327,757.” (ref)

and then, in 2013, wil wheaton (yep, that twerpy kid from star trek: the next generation) teamed up with his buddy felicia day to make some youtube videos on the ‘geek and sundry‘ channel. this video series, called TableTop, involved wil playing board games with other celebrities and it became wildly popular. wheaton and day decided to create their own channel and sought $500K in crowd-funding — they got $1.5mil.

when games appear on the show, the ‘wheaton effect’ (as the gaming people call it) happens. the game experiences an astronomical sales hike all over the world (tsuro shut down european sales to try to keep up with american demand).

also in 2013, wil and felicia decided to hold ‘international table top day’ and played a few board games with a few different celebrities and recorded it. now, since then, people all around the world (in 80 different countries on April 11, 2015) join together at their local gaming shops to experience deals and fun times together on ‘international table top day‘ which still happens at the whim of TableTop (not unlike Winter-een-mas).

so, board games have come with humans from any and every culture (there were also ones in central and south america, pre-colonization, and many other places) and have evolved to fit with our cultures and trends right along with us. and, now, they have a multi-million dollar market wielded by a former ensign on the enterprise — crazy.

so far about board games.