Board Games, Part 2

that this is still an open question. We talked about a lot of the evidence in the theories about why why play exists in animals, what purpose it serves, if it might be biologically adaptive in one way or another, the idea of that maybe it trains us for future skills, that maybe it signals fitness, that maybe it makes us more versatile and able to deal with unexpected events, and

all kinds of things like that. We also talked about theories about why abstracted versions of play like board games emerged. That maybe it was in order to sublimate a competitive instinct that could be violent if not given an outlet like games, Yeah, don't punch each other in the face,

play Little rockham Stock and robots instead, uh yeah. And and then also the idea that there is a deep inherent link between board games the earliest known board games and the practice of divination or sort of ledge, where you might do things like cast lots to figure out the will of the gods, or answer a question by

consulting some type of pseudo random object or event. You know, you throw knuckle bones and see what the gods are telling you, or consult the each ing, and that these kinds of things could have given way to board games that also involve casting of lots or rolling of knucklebones to see how many spaces you get to move on the board, right, and we see that legacy continue in

modern games. The Mystery Day, the Game of Life that we already mentioned, and though this is not technically a game, it is still kind of lumped into the same similar category. Certainly something you can buy at a toy store, but the magic eight ball. The magic eight ball is a toy that is obviously just overtly a divination tool, but one that as uh I thought, I would say, usually

I don't know. I would say that even as a kid, when I used a magic eight ball, there was a sense of wanting it to be real, like there was a you leaned into the magic, into the the sort of the divine aspect of the practice, even though you knew that this was was not actually a you know, a hotline to the fates, or that God had anything to do with what was happening in the ball, Robert, do you hear that? Yeah? Whoa? What is that? Something kind of cutting in cuttle Cat's cuttlefish to the second

oil age and his kingdom with whirl of darkness. I don't dispute the eurostata, but if he's down here, not blood but darkness, the Earth's black riches. No, I could taste it on my lips. Today, I want to talk to you about the science of transgenesis, tens genesis dot show. No, I guess it's gone now. Maybe it wasn't anything. Yeah, yeah, I just heard like a high pitched, like like glitchy noise. Robert, you've got a bit of blood in the owner of your eye. Oh my goodness. I yeah, I'm I'm bleeding

from rama. I want to get cleaned up here and we can keep going. I'm good, I'm good. Well, if I can get off topic for just a second here. Of course, I do think that there actually is that the eight ball and other divination methods like the Wegia board and all that. You know, we we can laugh at like the strict religious authorities and adults who say, don't fool around with the weedge board. You know, you're inviting demons in. Or they might say the same thing

about the magic eight ball. On one hand, that's kind of funny. But on the other hand, of course, I'm not suggesting like real spiritual demons actually come in and possess you if you play with a wigia board. I do think playing with a wigia board can be kind of dangerous because it suggests a divinatory frame of mind, even if you don't go in believing in it. I bet you've had this experience of playing around with something like this not believing it has any real magical power.

But then once you've played the game, you kind of start to wonder, and it tempts you, attempts you to think in terms of fate, in terms of like the intervention of of other otherworldly forces in your life. If you play with it enough, I can see how it could really suck your mind into that cast of thinking, which can be harmful. Well even just um just you know, marginal exposure to something to that kind of thinking can

have an effect. I think back to the episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind we did on the Chinese zodiac and uh, you know, with the lunar calendar, the different zodiac animals associated with each year, and the sort of the the loose too complicated characteristics that are aligned with individuals born in each year, and how you saw you when you look at the birth statistics, you see this this bump uh during the years of the Dragon,

the most auspicious year. And and one of the things that we found is that this didn't you didn't see this occurring because necessarily people were just like hardcore Chinese astrology believers, but that they were there were other things, probably more important things of impacting their their choices, But then this thing was in the background, like a casual understanding of the zodiac, and then that ended up perhaps

the argument is um uh influencing their choices. So just having something like the the eight ball or the Luigi board, or astrology or whatever supernatural model you want to lean on, just having there in the background can conceivably be enough

to tweak your choices, you know. And I wonder if this can be extended into partly explaining why games of chance have sometimes historically and even sometimes by by a few people today, been considered dangerous because if there is this kind of danger, you know, even if there aren't really spirits that are gonna come mess with you, there is a kind of danger in setting your mind to the cast of thinking that is encouraged by divination methods, and that rolling dice to play a game of chance

is in a way a form of divination. It is kind of a slightly abstracted sortilage practice. Now, I also want to remind everybody, since it, you know, may have been a week since you listen to the last episode, we're going to talk a little bit as we continue about sort of the what I'm thinking of the three corners of gaming that you're gonna have the mechanics of the game. That's the rules, the system of rules that dictate how it's played, the skeleton the skeleton ya, who wins,

how they win, et cetera. Then you have the fluff, which, especially in modern games, this is the story, the characters, the setting, the illustration and illustrations. And then you have the material aspect of it, which could be as simple as a board and some sort of you know, a dice or it is something more elaborate, like it requires a poplematic bubble, or you know, the battleships set requires

this whole plastic interface, etcetera. The Omega virus robots that talks to you and or the videotape you put in with the you the one who is moving now right, Or there are a lot of games you know nowadays, or there are a lot of games that have just required timers. You need that hour glass, right, But a lot of games now that either have a timing element or something more complicated than that will require you to use an app which which it can also be used

to great effect. Well, I think we should then try to turn our attention to what is the earliest known evidence of physical apparatus for for these types of abstract games like board games. What's the earliest evidence we have that somebody was playing something like a board game. Well, when you start diving back through history, you find that some of the uh what is considered the earliest archaeological evidence for board games pops up in the Neolithic Middle

East around seven thousand BC. Wow, board games nine thousand years ago. But this would have been the time in which individuals living in this region we're beginning to find social leisure and security on a regular basis for the first time. So they were feeling safe enough, they were feeling secure enough, and you know how much food they had available that they had, say, you know, a few minutes in the afternoon to scratch some a grid into

the dirt and maybe move a few pebbles around. Now, I would think a grid scratched into the dirt would not survive nine thousand years. So what is the physical evidence we have that people were playing games like this at the time. Well, that is one of the key the key challenges because we tend to find what might be the boards or the pieces, and sometimes it can be difficult to figure out exactly what we're looking at,

you know. Uh. Indeed, if it's something as simple as pegs and stone owns, or little holes drilled in stones, or some sort of a grid and stones, there's a fair amount of interpretation figuring out why people made these marks. Um And certainly we're not going to find anything like the rules for ancient game. If if you have a game that is predating written language, there is no rule book to go by. It would have just been an

oral tradition. So it's not always easy to say, yes, this was probably part of a game, this was something

that served litteral or no purpose outside of leisure. For instance, there's the Neolithic Beta site, which dates back to somewhere between seventy two hundred and sixty b C. And it's near Petra, Jordan's Uh and this is one of many ancient sites where we have we find stone slabs with three parallel rows of regular holes, and this might have been an early precursor to Mancala, which is of course one of the world's most ancient games and one that

we still find versions of throughout the world. You can usually buy it at a store or even I remember a version of Mancola got popular at my school. I think when I was in I don't know, something like sixth grade. Does that sound about right. Yeah, I think that it has come backs occasionally. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of these you just see. I don't think I've ever owned a copy, but you you see it around like it's for something with such ancient origins, it's still very

much alive. Basically, it involves like you get to go along a series of holes or impressions, dropping in seeds or stones, one at a time and like counting out the number of places you get to go. Right, it's generally a colored beads nowadays, but but the older model would have probably used seeds or beans, and this might reveal its origins as a fertility ritual for early agricultural societies.

Again getting into a little bit into the divination and a little get into the magical perhaps origins of games. That's really interesting the idea. Yeah, so seeds, agriculture and fertility, but also having perhaps some kind of divinatory role exactly. Yeah, and uh, these were pretty white, widespread, to the point that mencla games are are even a whole category of

ancient games in some classifications. Now there are different classifications for for games and board games that you'll find depending on who the scholar is that's doing the analysis. But for instance, Harold James Ruthren Murray is one of the individuals who categorized games, and he said, okay, well we have men calla games, that's a category. But then he

had other games, for instance, alignment and configuration games. The most obvious example of this is tic tac toe Connect four Connect four I think would probably count basic principles the same. You have war games. Of course, the classic example there is chess, but you can throw in your warhammer games, you can throw in your risk games. I mean, these are all essentially games that simulate warfare. Then they're hunting games. I don't think I've played one of these,

or at least I don't think I have. But Fox and Geese is an example that pops up in different cultures. This was the hardest category for me to understand. I think maybe it involves sort of like collecting pieces, like you compete to collect them or something. Yeah, it kind of makes more sense if you if you look at a picture of it. So if you do a search for fox and Geese games, you'll see some some images. Then there are race games, and the prime example here

is backgammon. I don't think I've ever played backgammon, so I don't actually know how you do it. Well, it's it's a pretty ancient game that but is also apparently a descendant of the two row Roman dice game twelve lines, which itself was based on older forms of the same mechanic. And this is something you see with a lot of

these games. It's just this continual evolution of form games are passed on almost virally from culture to culture, and new spins are put on them because for a certain to a certain extent, especially when they're when it's just oral tradition. Uh, you know, it's going it's like a game of telephone, but with the game rules levels of complexity and simplification altering across the centuries. Yeah. I think that's one of the key insights of the study of

games is that games are just are not fixed. They always change. Yeah, like even something like Monopoly, which we'll we'll get into more later, but it's easy for me, especially to think, Okay, Monopoly, is this awful game that never changes. Oh yeah, we learned that last time you hate Monopoly. Hate Monopoly. Yeah, you go to the store and there's some new version of Monopoly and it's the same version of Monopoly, different pictures. They just tweaked the

fluff like that. You can even get Warhammer Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly. Yeah. But but even but I say that, but deuced Bigelow Monopoly. I say this, but I was just talking to Scott Benjamin, who helped us research this episode, and he pointed out that actually you do see evolution

in Monopoly. There's a millennial Monopoly that came out where they've altered the rules, not only the fluff, but the rules itself to indicate that you're not you're not buying things, you're renning things, and then of course they're there's also like a card game based of Monopoly. There are other games with the same franchise and similar fluff. Wait a minute, if you're renting them, how do you how do you what do your sublease when people land on your tiles

on the board. I don't know. Uh, community chest is replaced with like take a puff of the jewel. Well, as long as the as long as the game ends the same way all Monopoly games end, and that is with friends mad at each other, that's all that counts. That's not my experience. That's my experience with risk because that risk makes people hate each other. Okay, I never played risk. I had friends who are really into it.

But that's one that also goes really long, right it can, and risk risk is like the number one offender for for outing table flippers, for you know, letting you know which are your friends is actually a really bad sport to find out through risk. Yeah, you know, thinking back to Monopoly, and then I think, you know, I had friends who were playing risk too, Is that part of it.

It's like a really long game that's played at night in many cases, and so you've just been doing it for so long, you're tired, you need to go home, you need to go to sleep, You're still stuck in this low stakes um b s And then yeah, eventually you just gotta flip the table. Elements make it worse. Most often, i'd say, played for a long time at night by adult men who have maybe been consuming alcohol. So like, yeah, it's a bad scene and will let

the demons in for sure. All right, well, let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to roll into some some specific examples, some more specific examples of ancient games and and really we can learn a lot about just the nature of board games in general by looking at what we know and what we don't know about these ancient pastimes. All right, we're back now.

Earlier we talked about the idea that there is perhaps physical evidence of some type of unidentified Neolithic board game just been found in like near Petra in Jordan's that was perhaps a form of the Moncola game type but we don't know for sure, and that that was maybe like seven thousand b C or nine thousand years ago. The oldest game that we definitely really know about on are sure it's a game we have direct archaeological evidence of,

is a game from ancient Egypt called senate. That's right, also known as the game of thirty squares, also known as the game of passing, which will get back to later. I think that's what senate actually means, is passing. So the dates range on this, So I've seen dates that that say Senate goes back to roughly three thousand BC. Yeah, I've seen that there's evidence trace to BC or basically

roughly the fourth millennium BC. Either way, it was played in pre dynastic times, and we can even turn to tomb paintings that that actually depict ancient Egyptians playing this game during this time period. Yeah. One famous one is an ancient Egyptian painting of Queen Nefertari, one of the wives of Rams. He's the great, and this painting of Nefertory playing Senet is within the queen's own tomb, so in her tomb in the Valley of Queens and Thebes

there's a painting of her playing a board game. That's dedication. I mean she was probably nationally ranked. Well yeah, probably so now when you look at this illustration, I've actually seen this illustration wrongfully identified as her playing chess. That's not correct. Chess wouldn't come about for another four thousand years in India, and I think that's worth remembering too. By the time chess was invented, games like this were

more ancient than chess is now. Yeah, that's unbelievable. I love putting ancient history in that kind of perspective, like thinking about the things, the things in ancient Egypt that we're older to the ancient Romans than ancient Rome is to us. That's always something I'd like to keep in perspective. Um, But so what do we know about this games net?

We know it was played with multiple game pieces, So there were these things that look kind of like ponds that were sometimes made of like a blue type ceramic material, and it was played on a grid of thirty squares. There were three rows of ten squares, and several of the squares had symbolic hieroglyphs on them, seemingly symbolizing game imagery. Such as the water Trap, like there'd be a water square.

And while our evidence of synet is often in the form of elaborate game boxes used by the wealthy, it speculated that the game could also have been played by the poor simply by drawing a grid in the sand, or by like making scratches on a rock or a board. And this is something we we see with some of the later games we're going to discuss, where you had the ornate version with a little in a box underneath

it to keep the pieces in. But then you also see evidence of graffiti versions where someone just scrawled it

on on stone and played it exactly. Now, the exact rules for Senate, though, are ultimately just a matter of conject Sure, yeah we know something sort of, but we don't fully know how the game was originally played, right, And you can just imagine this exercise taking various modern games and imagine, you know, opening them and having absolutely no instructions, no written language about how they were played. In some cases you can pretty much piece it together.

Fireball Island, candy Candy Land, especially Snakes and Ladders or Shoots and Ladders. These are games that you know, you can you can figure it out pretty quickly. Other games with more you know, ambiguity is harder to tell, right if you took a box of Arkham Horror. And it's hard enough to tell what you're supposed to do in Arkham Horror when you have the rules, but if you have no rules, I can imagine there would be different models based on it. Well, we think it was played

this way. We think these tiles were possibly used in this way shape or form. Future archaeologists five thousand years from now are definitely going to be able to figure out how to play cross Fire because that's just obvious. You can't miss it. Yeah, hungry hungry hippos. Yeah, that's another one though. Of course, you can determine some things, as we're saying, just by looking at what the what we've been talking about is the materials of the game are.

What are the things you have to work with. It's believed that this game Senate was played by casting of some equivalent of dice, maybe casting knucklebones or throwing sticks, and this would help determine what kind of moves you could make. Knucklebones, by the way, often these would be

a knucklebones from say a sheep or a goat. So something that was regularly slaughtered and and used for to manufacture items, and it would be something more like a four sided dice, like a D four in modern gaming terms. I don't know for sure, but I would have to guess that that would mean it's it's the biological shape would mean it's not quite perfectly random which number you get, like there is actually a bias towards some of the faces of the dice, since it's not, you know, perfectly

machined to be equal. That's a good point, but I don't know that that just seems likely to me. One of the really interesting things about Senate is how this game held sacred connotations for the ancient Egyptians, Like it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Nefertari has shown playing the game in a painting within her own tomb. Uh The pharaoh Tutton Common was also buried with Senate game boxes among his grave goods to be taken into the next life. And we mentioned earlier that the name

of the game means passing. It's the game of passing, and this probably has significance on the board itself, because it's believed that you played the game by sort of advancing past your opponent along the squares, and you could like pass your opponent, you could block your opponent. So it is in some ways literally a game of passing

in terms of its mechanics. But Senate also seems to hold this strong religious significance associated with death, which for the ancient Egyptians meant passing on into the afterlife through this cosmic journey. I know, Robert, you've talked about that on stuff to blow your mind before. You know, the beliefs about the journey of the dead among the ancient Egyptians, where you'd adventure through the nether world. Yeah, it's not just a matter of your going off to something we

would think of as sort of a modern paradise. There's like trials, their trials and could you know, continued adventures and adversaries in the in the Egyptian afterlife, And that's one of the reasons that the departed has to bring all this stuff with them, Like some of it, they're bringing things they like, but they're also bringing things they will need exactly, and so it may serve some purpose to like, uh, I mean, I'm thinking about passing time

in the afterlife. They're all these. Uh I don't know if this is just a curious feature of English and in how these ironies are stacking up. But so this is a game which, like the idea of a game in ancient India often meant you know that they literally meant time passing, like the passing of time in a game. Uh So games are for in a way passing time. The mechanics of the game involved passing players is the game of passing, and the meaning of the game spiritually

has to do with passing into immortality. Huh. Interesting, boy, there's probably a lot you could do was just looking at how different board games interpret linear and cyclical time um or both to some extent, you know, of taking taking our existence and piecing them out into step by step. Well yeah, I mean this is so if this game in some way is presented as a model of something that these people believed actually happened to them. We still have games like that today. I mean we were talking

earlier about the game of life. I mean, the game of life in many ways you could think of as a kind of um like normative model formation engine. For like, this is what a life looks like. You you know, go to college, you get a job and you start a family, and the Game of Life kind of enforces that by having you go through these motions over and over again. It's all there in the fluff, like all the normative things that are being suggested about what life

should be like. Perhaps Senator is the same way. I mean, when thinking about the religious details of the game, I started to wonder about if some part of the purpose of the game was not necessarily to have the negative connotations of this word, but propagandistic, to spread particular ideas through a catchy and inherently fun medium. It wouldn't be the only game that did this right. We just mentioned

the Game of Life, but think about Monopoly. Even though it's one of the most popular board games in modern history, Monopoly has its roots like thoroughly in pushing a particular point of view. Specifically, it was created in the early nineteen hundreds by our writer, inventor and progressive activist named Lizzie Maghee or Maggie m. A. G I. E. And Maghee invented it specifically to illustrate the dangers and evils of monopolies, of wealth accumulation and of these like rent

seeking barons that you become in the game. It's ironic because Monopoly has been in a very simple way. It kind of glorifies this idea of the of the mustachioed rich man. That's the funny thing that originally wasn't supposed

to It was supposed to do the opposite. The original title of her game was The Landlord's Game, and Mage summed it up summed up her goal to a reporter in nineteen o six by saying, quote, in a short time, I hope a very short time, men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller maybe have more than they know what to do with. Yeah. Again, that is directly the opposite of the message if you want to say that modern monopoly has it is directly

the opposite of the message monopoly. Well, I think it would depend on how you frame it. But yeah, I mean, people don't tend to take that away, do that. Well, what's the monopoly guy's name? He has a name? Right? These Mr money Bags? Right? Mr money Bags looks too cute and adorable, Like he needs to he needs to have more of this gnaar Old Ebenezer Scrooge like vibe to him, you know, wearing like a necklace of bones and yeah all that. Yeah, it needs to be less this.

Uh yeah, he needs to be less cute and needs to be grotesque in some fashion, like like the real Ultra rich are. Well, they had to make the game friendly to children. That's where they went wrong. But a funny thing also about the game is that she was apparently interested it and using it to promote Georgian economics, the set of ideas stemming from the economist Henry George. Did you did you know about this problem? Yeah? So, basically George suggested that people should not be taxed. I

think this is the basic form. People shouldn't be taxed on the income from the work they do, but instead should be taxed so that the spoils of land ownership and subsequently like natural resources and rent and everything are distributed equally among everyone. So you can't make money just by owning land or by owning a mine or something like that. Instead, you can only make money on the work you do. But Monopoly is a game in which

that's what you do. You just acquired things and just money comes in because so you're playing as the bad guy in monopoly. But again, it gets you know, it gets kind of you start thinking about it backwards. But anyway, of course, the game became wildly popular, especially in these derivative forms, for for which other game designers apparently claimed credit. But it didn't necessarily teach the players, as we're saying,

all the things that make you hope it would. And so this is something else to consider that It's widely agreed, as we were saying earlier, that the rules of games change over time. You know, games don't stay fixed, they evolve. And I want to pair that with the fact that you don't often have to put much effort at all into a task to make it feel like a game. Just framing it as a game can be effective and making it feel fun and like a game. And this

has been demonstrated by empirical research. You know, the whole Tom Sawyer painting the Fence trick. You know, this is a great game where you paint the fence, uh, and everybody wants to get in on it. Apparently there's some research that shows this is true. I was looking at a study from in the journal Games and Culture by Andreas liber Off that is called shallow gamification, testing psychological effects of framing and activity as a game, and I found you know, you don't really have to do much

work to make something into a game. You just sort of call it a game and get the basic basically frame it as a game, and people will enjoy it

as if it is a game. So anyway, my my crazy series of thoughts here is I wonder if games, maybe like sent It as an example, could be created to teach or model or advocate a particular view of the world, a political view of the world, a religious view of the world, creating some kind of normative model of how people should see things or how people should behavior act, but later end up spreading and remaining popular

simply because the game mechanics are fun. And then the fluff loses meaning or gets shed or gets changed over time, sort of like happened with Monopoly. Yeah yeah, well this would be a discussion for another time. But like you do, wonder what does a particular country or regions popular game forms? What does that say about them? Like what does MONOPOLYI say about the US? And I think it's unfair to have that be our game, but what what what does

monopolies popular to say about the United States? What does say uh, settlers of Catan and other German and European design games. What do they say about mainland Europe? Does the popularity of Warhammer forty say about the United Kingdom? Is that where it comes from? Um? And then again these are Perhaps this would be an attempt to read too much into a game's popularity, but but at the same time, I do agree that I think there there

is some sort of influence taking place. Like you to to engage in in a game, to engage in a system of a game's rules, Uh, you're really putting your head in and you're putting your taking your thought process and forcing it to mimic the the systematic layout of the game. Yes, but as we're seeing it seems like if the game is fun, it's possible that the layout of the game, you know, the thing that maybe even it was intended to teach or put you in the frame of mind of that can all be lost, can

all be changed. It's possible that Sinet is something that's created for a kind of normative cultural purpose. In nah in Egypt, it serves to teach something about their religion and their society and all that. But because it's a fun game, it spreads to other societies for which these meanings don't really carry over, right, So they're just that they're just stuck with the mechanics. Yeah, and uh, and

that's what they can continues to live on. I mean, another way of thinking about this could be the original forms of chess were you know what. Therefore, perhaps they were for trying to like teach a military mindset to young knights or something like that, but you know, that's not necessarily what they're for now. It just turns out that the mechanics of the game are too fun to be contained, and they survived their original cultural context or meaning.

So now we're gonna be talking about the Royal Game of Her, another ancient game from thousands of years ago. We last time we talked about the Egyptian board game Senate. That this is a um somewhat similar game, though it's different. Senate was a game of thirty squares that were lined up in three rows of ten squares and you somehow advanced along the squares and tried to pass your opponent

or is somewhat different. But it's also a game of squares, right, Yeah, it's it's basically two square grids connected by this little bridge. So you have a three by two grid, and then you have a three by four grid, and then you have a two square horizontal bridge connecting the two and um, I we said the name of this is the Game of Er. And I believe if anyone who's listened to stuff to blow your mind, you might remember that we've

in the past mentioned the Great Ziggurat of Er. Well, it's the same Er so in what is now southern iraq Um. And to be clear, evidence of the Game of Er dates to the same time period as the Great Pyramid of Giza. We're talking b C. I think I've we've also seen twenty hundred BC as a date for the Game of Er. Okay, so almost as ancient a senate. Yeah yeah, pretty old. Now we're not again.

This is another one where we're not exactly sure how the game was played with this curious board, but different scholars have weighed in to suggest how the pieces moved might have moved, and how they might have be been battled in the narrow channel between the smaller and greater grids. Game historian Andrea Becker believes that the origins of the game might have been a form of divination. Okay, so that again, Yeah, with the specific boards related to specific

sorts of divination. What's more, she argues that they might have also served as a way to teach divination. So that's interest. So instead of teaching, um, you know, some sort of economic model. Uh, it's about teaching someone how to divine the future. Huh. Well, so now I'm seeing three ways that you can have a relationship between ancient board games and divination methods. So you could have one

one route that's just derivative. Right, You've got divination methods where so you throw knucklebones to get an answer from the gods, and then you also realize that that can be used to determine outcomes in an abstract scenario, which is like a game. So it's just derivative of divination. Another router connection here would be that it's used to teach divination. A third would be that it is a form of divination, that the board game itself is a

method of consulting the gods. Yeah, I mean it gets into the whole situation like is any battle game Is it a battle? Is it a simulation of the battle? Is it is it preparing you to simulate or take place in a battle. Yes, it derivative from battle principles. Is it designed to teach you battle or is it actually a form of battle that's supposed to decide something exactly? Now, one of the cool things about Earth is that eventually

we did get some codified writings about how it is played. Uh, not so clear apparently that there's not a lot of continued discussion about exactly how it was played. And of course how it was played probably changed over time, right, but many centuries after it's it's introduction, you did have a clay tablet from one seventy seven b C. That that raid in on how to play it. And it's a rare exception to the lost history nature of of

board game designers, because uh, if accounts are true. Uh, And of course we have to sort of flat grain of salt when we're talking about individuals described as doing things in ancient texts. But um, the rules for for this game were codified by the Babylonian scholar inscribe Itty Mar, Duke of Balatu in one s b c. And he even added new features which Brian fagan Um in his book said, quote enliven it for the contemporary gambler. So I'm assuming that means play mechanics and not mere fluff.

But there is a there is a lot of interesting fluff to this game actually, and the fluff, I would say, seems to coincide with the idea that the game was used for divination related purposes, maybe to teach divination or maybe actually as a form of divination associated with astrology. Right,

that's right. So a man by the name of Irving Finkel with the British Museum, I believe he translated the Cuneiform and believed that while there were strong astrological aspects to or, he believed it was still primarily a game. So that the so the astrology was fluff as opposed to, uh, it's it's primary purpose in society. But the fluff is really interesting. Like I looked up some of this writing and translation work by Irving Finkel on the quine form

of the the original board. And so what the evidence shows is that the squares of the board were often labeled in a way that caused the game board to produce prediction statements as you played it. Uh, And this is from Irving Finkel, And so you'd have these ways that the game board could produce sort of a sentence, but it would also be associated with an astrological sign. So so you could have the game board say one who sits in a tavern, or I will pour out

the dregs for you. Or you will find a friend, or you will stand in exalted places, or you will be powerful like a lion, or you will go up the path. Uh. There are a bunch of interesting ones, like one who weighs up silver. I love these there. They make the game feel very creepy and elemental. Or the one that says you will cut meat. You will cut meat. That's a great one. What does that mean? Does that mean? Is that good neat? Like I will I will have a feast in my honor and I

will give you the one to cut it. Or is it more like I will work at the butcher's shop. I don't know. You will cut meat? Apparently it's associated with the astrological sign of Aquarius. Uh. And there are other similarities like that, like you will be powerful like a lion is associated with the sign of Leo. That gets really interesting because you know, we we can think about ourselves, we can think of modern humans and for us,

divination practices can be fun. Again, going back to the idea of the something like a fortune cookie at an American Chinese restaurant or magic eight ball, magic eight ball or you know what's actually also at the intersection of a game and a divination practice is you remember the game MASH that the kids would play in elementary school and stuff. Um, are you talking about with the folding paper? Yeah, it was, well, I think it was MASH. I think

stands for mansion, apartment, shock house. And so it would be a thing where you'd have a number of options for different things that could come out of it. So you'd be like, who will you marry, and then you'd give like four options. And then the thing that you'd use some kind of pseudo random procedure to generate a number that would like have you go through the list counting a certain number of places to like rule out answers until you got to the end, and the end

would give you some combination of possible answers. It would be like you will live in a mansion and you'll be married to Tim Curry and you know, etcetera. Interesting. So, so, yeah, there's the fun side to divination. But even today people people get taken in by by divination uh, and it can be a very stressful, a very serious situation that you can you know, people can lose a lot of money investing in divination. But then likewise, gaming is much

the same. Games can be a lot of fun, but if you're playing the wrong game, you're playing with the wrong people, or you're playing with the wrong attitude, games can be a seriously unpleasant experience. Yeah, okay, we just got a Mash update from Tari outside the booth here. Apparently Tari was a big MASH fan, and she says, one important part we left out is that you've got to add bad options in your mash list. So it's like,

I guess the shock and Mash. You also like, if you have potential husbands you'll marry one of them has got to be a really like lame, ugly guy. Uh so that you'll end up with funny combinations. She says, So maybe you're living in a mansion, but you're married to pee wee herman. You know, this reminds me a little bit of of of a card game that I've really enjoyed playing recently called Gloomy and uses these transparent cards that actually have a mechanical purpose in the game.

But essentially you have these cards that indicate different members of your sort of Edward gory uh style family. And then you want to have the most miserable family that dies in horror. Oh you told me about this, and and so and so. What you try to do is to make sure your family has the most horrible experience possib bull and dies off. Meanwhile bestowing um, you know, happy things upon the other. So, so you want your family members to say, catch some awful plague and drown

in a well. But then you want members of the opposing families to say, for Alic with a kitten or something like that. So mash is the mash is complex. It's got to include both possible outcomes. Right, it's part gloom and it's part mirror, mirror on the wall. It's like part giving you all the stuff you want to hear. And then also it's got to throw in some bad news to make it real. All right, well, let's let's bring it back to her here. Uh, there's at least

one theory that or eventually evolved into backgammon. So again we see this time and time again with these old games, like looking at the possible lines that connected them and then also kind of like like species, like like actual organisms. You see examples where one game was kind of killed off by another. You had like an invasive game come from another culture, and everyone's like, whoa, why aren't we playing this when we could be playing that? And then

a game dies. But another interesting thing that Finkel brought up is a that that it likely used what we're known as astro gals, and these would have been those four sighted dice made from the knucklebones of sheep or goats. Again, it's it's so fascinating to think of many modern board and dice games as the tail end of something that began and perhaps divination maps and rattled animal bones. You know. Uh,

in this sense, all games are potentially occult exercises. By the way, Finkel apparently has a couple of books about out about ancient board games that feature rules and punch out boards and spinners, so, you know, so younger players especially can can try out at least versions of what some of these ancient games could have consisted of. We gotta wonder, like, what are the best games lost to history?

You we know that there must have been lots of games that we don't even really know anything about, or maybe only have a hint of. We don't know all the rules that could be a most fun game ever, they could be so addictive, and we do. We just don't know what they are. Because there's of course an endless possible combination of rules you can come up with for moving pieces around on a board. Maybe there's like the ultimate perfect game out there, and it's totally unknown.

What if they they basically had Space Hulk Babylonian times, because again coming back to what I said, there's no reason you couldn't have a game with the exact same mechanics as Space Hulk, take place in an ancient setting. But I thought what was a major part of the appeal of Space Hulk was the fluff, Like you like the illustrations in the setting and all that. Right, I do. But then, but Space Hulk also has this wonderful mechanic

where you have to you have to force. You have the humans who are superpowered and tough, but then you have the Horde, and the Horde that so the timing is different. So when the humans go, when the human player goes, uh, they have a time limit. They have a certain amount of time in which they have to make all their moves and use all of their movement points, but the player controlling the the alien horror of the

Gene Steelers, they have all the time they need. So I do feel like there's something primal and attractive in the mechanics of Space Hulk that cats this feeling of of you know, it's like it's like it's so grim dark. It's the most grim dark game because it's like I am up against death. I am up against this thing that is ever patient and ever lasting, and it's probably in the game. I mean, it's probably going to kill you.

It's a very dangerous game to play. Um and part of the fun is not in oh did I win?

But did I almost win? Now? If I understand the Warhammer universe correctly, it would also be the implication that the humans are not really good, right, No, no, the humans are awful, but but they're the best choice compared to all of the other awful things in the universe, which does feel kind of like appropriately, like like ancient that it could have the mechanics like this could have found their their way and say a Babylonian uh mindset that all right, let's take one or break and we

come back. Uh, we're gonna just roll through a few more examples of ancient board games and board games of note, and then we're going to close out. Alright, we're back now. One of the ancient games that seemed kind of interesting to me is a game of if I understand correctly, it's basically of unknown mechanics known as Lubo, which is an ancient Chinese board game. Right, the name means six sticks. It's the game of six sticks. Uh, Lubou sounds a

lot better, rolls off the top a lot, a lot easier. Uh. So the rules of this game, yeah, are still uncertain, but we see figurines of men playing it from Han dynasty tombs that would have been the area of two to b C two two twenty c E. And it was likely invented in the first millennium b C. But the height of its popularity was definitely the Han dynasty. So there would have been two players. There was a board and sticks were thrown to determine the movement of pieces.

And one of the reasons we don't know a lot about this game is this game died out because there was an invasive there was another game. There was a competitor. The game of Go entered the picture in the Joe Dynasty around somewhere in the region of ten forty six through two e and eventually just overtook Lubou to become the most important board game in Chinese culture, and it remains so to this day. Now, we didn't uh, you know,

we're talking about casting the sticks here. One thing we didn't even really get into this, into it all in this was the long dice. You see these referenced in um in some of the Hindu epics. To kind about casting the long dice in battle, you know, whether just there were a type of dice that were there were long and more stick like, but they were used as a as as a form of of generating a random figure. Now, speaking of India, we do have to at least touch

on chess really quickly. Again, Chess a much later game than anything else we've discussed here. First millennium CE came out of India and it still commands a global following today. And it's even though it's not as as ancient as these other games, it's still pretty old. And it's really impressive that chess remains such a standard of strategic board games, you know, like it is. I mean, it is kind

of the gold standard. I mean, I think it's one of those games that doesn't really need much fluff because it's mechanics are so solid that it is, uh, there is such a thing. I mean, I think again we should acknowledge we've sort of been hinting at this that it's pretty clear that some games are just inherently better

than others mechanically. I mean, there's this such a thing as a much more balanced game that's uh, that does better at allowing different types of strategy and thus makes it more interesting because they are more different ways you can achieve a win. There are other games that are that are I think just sort of easier to hack. I think that's the thing that that makes for a

bad game. A game that's easy to hack, can you break the game, or a game that requires no skill at all, of course, but among games that require a skill, if there's a way to hack it so that if you just know a certain strategy you can pretty much always win, that game becomes less interesting. Tick Tack Toe is a good example of that. I mean, if you know how to play, and you go first, you can always either win or be forced to a draw, right. I think another similar example is Apples to Apples, which

can be a fun game. I'm not anti Apples to Apples, but if one person does not want to play, if one person wants to break the game, they will break it. That's breaking in the opposite way. Yeah, breaking by like not uh having a strategy that just always wins, but breaking by ruining it for everybody. Right though, most games that involve most games that involve any kind of like, I don't know, intelligent input or verbal input by the player, I feel it can be like that. It seems to me.

I'm not I don't have as much experience with D and D as you do, but it seems to be Dungeons and Dragons is clearly a game where one bad player can completely ruin the game. Well yeah, there's such

a social context with Dungeons and Dragons. Um. I was talking to this with with one of the gamers I played with recently about the idea of competitive Dungeons and Dragons and how there there have been some efforts to create sort of the I wouldn't necessarily say a limited rule set, but certainly a system in which you could have competitive game playing between characters, and then you can also I guess there are some of the older like

really fierce dungeons that can be used as a competitive environment. But for the most part, you're not going to see games of Dungeons and dragons on say ESPN six or whatever. But you will see games of Magic the Gathering on there because Magic the Gathering is is more of a traditional game. It is a traditional card game that has hard fast rules and uh and does not have this

social role playing element to it. Another example, and this is one we have a whole episode of stuff to blow your mind about, but Werewolf is a high social game. And certainly if if you if you were playing Werewolf with people that were not on board with it. Uh and I don't even like to imagine people of that caliber, but if they were trying to play a game with people who are not into it, um, you know it would it would wreck the game. You just wouldn't be

able to play Werewolf. Absolutely, one obnoxious player will ruin the experience. Now I mentioned earlier, you know what happens when an invasive games game comes in and it's better than what you have. One example of that is the Viking game tablet uh. This is one of the Norse taffle games from the fourth through twelve centuries, probably based on the earlier Roman game Lutus latron cooler ruma, and

it was replaced by chess in the twelfth century. So basically they found chess and they're like, whoa, this is way better than this thing. Let's just switch to chess, and they did. Now that makes it interesting also because that suggests that certain games occupy certain almost like ecological niches within culture if they can be placed like that, because one game obviously does not displace all other games.

You know, a new game doesn't come in and say, now this is the only game people play and all other games are gone. It can it can beat out certain games, and it's it makes it suggest that, like there's an ecosystem of play and that certain games feel so certain roles within that and that if another game comes in and feels that particular role better than that game will win out. But you you wouldn't see chess

replacing foot racing, you know. Yeah, yeah, there's a certain place in your culture, in your life, maybe even daily or weekly life, that this game can occupy. And if something fits that fits that that role better, then yeah, it's going to take over. It also suggests that there are different kinds of fun, and that certain games elicit one particular type of fun but not another one, so they'll be in competition for that limited fun resource that

people have to give. As one consequence of thing like this, I've sometimes wondered, like, Okay, how much overlap is there between the demand for board games and the demand for video games. Will video games ever completely replace board games? What's it's been interesting to to sort of watch this play out right, because today we have so many amazing video games. Uh, there's just you know there the graphics,

the complexity, the different types of video games. And at the same time, look at the board game renaissance that we're living in, where there's living in a golden age of you can go out and you can find so many different types of competitive game, strategic games, cooperative games, games that mix competition and cooperation, games with a million different varieties of fluff to them, games for for old

people with young people, different levels of rural complexity. Games and you know that certainly have some basis in video game design, Like there's certain communication between the two worlds for sure, but there's there's just there's just so much out there. Like clearly, board games for ill something in

our lives that a video game cannot quite handle. Yeah, one clear example is that board games have some kind of social element that's um, I don't want to say more mainstream, because that's not necessarily it, but the social element that's more acceptable among certain kinds of social uh settings than video games do. Like I can see there are people who would be into going over to a friend's house for a board game night, but who would not be going into going over to a friend's house

for a video game night. Well, right, I remember going over to like people's places and they're playing rock Band, and that's a that's a game where you work together, you play it together with other people. But everybody where's everybody looking, they're looking at the screen. It's just it was kind of a sad site. But you go over and you play a board game together, uh, and you're you're facing each other, you end up hating each other depending on the game, right, But but then you have

this interface between you. It's this this thing that's bringing it together. And so only video games can be very social there are some wonderful online communities built up around these, but the board game is ah it facilitates a more of a physical in person connection. You know. It is people who would otherwise not gather around a table uh and have anything to talk about, can gather around the

right game and and they're good to go. After all this discussion, I'm kind of interested in coming back to the question we started with. I don't know if we've answered this, but to think a little bit more about, now that we looked at these games, what is the what is the role these games are playing in the

biological impulse toward play? Again, we know that we haven't fully answered the question of why play exists among animals like us, But they're all these theories that maybe it signals reproductive fitness, that maybe it helps teach us skills we need later in life. Maybe it helps and makes us make us more versatile, you know, things like that.

Where do board games fit into these theories, if, if anywhere? Indeed, I hope this is there's a question that people will take with them as they go on to inevitably play board games with their friends, with family, with co workers, with strangers. However, you want to do it. Um. And certainly if you weren't planning to play a board game, maybe consider picking one up or pulling one out of the closet. As we get to close out here, UH, we always want to thank Scott Benjamin for helping us

out with research on these episodes. Scott brought a number of cool board game facts and uh and lists to our to our attention, including a couple of world records that are interesting to look at in light of everything we've discussed. So one of them is the largest collection of board games as of two thousand and eleven, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It was one Uh Jeff Bossby's in the United States with one thousand and thirty one different board games. You know that's too

many board games? Sorry, I don't know. I don't want to be judgmental, but like, can you really play all those? And it sounds doable, it's not improbable. Um. And then the longest marathon playing a board game. Uh. This was from two thousand, seventeen eighty hours, achieved by four participants in the Netherlands. Uh. And this was from January three through the sixth seventeen. They played a total of four hundred games of Gunzen Board Game of the Goose during

the eighty hour marathon. That sounds like too many games of Gonsen board. Yeah, I mean you could have fit like three games of Arkham Harror instead. So I'm sorry, I'm getting old finger wagon. Um. I love Go Home Guys, I kid Arkham her, I love Arkham Hart, but I've

also never completed a game of Arkham harr Um. So anyway, just a couple of Guinness World records to help close out these two episodes on games, I just had one more thought about thinking about the role of board games among the biological category of play, and maybe a way of approaching the question of what role they serve or what they What the real essence is is to think about what makes a board game not fun? Like that

that might help us come in on it. So one thing that's definitely not fun is when board games are too easy to win, right when or when there's no skill involved, Like I mean, I guess little kids enjoy playing candy Land, but just general like roll the dice and move your pieces and have no skill involved, that's

not fun, not for not for growing and advanced players. Um. Likewise, I one frustration I've had with certain games, and I won't name them, is when I've played a game where there were too many ways to win, like it was there. I like having a certain amount of complexity, like it's neat when you have like a doom counter and you know there are several different things going on at once.

But there was at least one game I've played and I just it was like there were five different ways to win it, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing, like how I was supposed to uh, employee strategy. I just felt kind of lost in this system, and I felt like it needed to be It needed to be somewhat simplified, at least for a first play. I know exactly what you mean. At a game night here in the office, I once what We played a game that was some kind of like zombie outbreak setting

type game. I've never heard of it before, but it had so many rules. The rule book was like a novel, and there were just so many different things you could do or had to do each turn. And we played this game for like multiple hours and still and we had never figured out how to play by the end. By the time we stopped um, and that is frustrating. That's like, that's not fun. Maybe some people have fun doing that, but I don't, and I think a lot of players don't. So there's also a part of us

that desires a game to be concise. Like there's a certain kind of elegance in games that have a small list of rules from which great complexity of game and play emerges. Right. I also like it when a game organically gradually increases the complexity. So there's a there's a game I really like called Fabled Fruit, and it's a it's basically a card game, very kid friendly, and the cards change as you progress. So when they start off,

it's very simple. You're trying to collect different fruits to make different essentially smoothies, and each smoothie as a point. But you you you quickly move through the initial cards and you get in in. The more you play the game, the more complex the mechanics of the cards becomes. But but you're gonna work up to that, Like, you just work up to that point by virtue of playing the game. And I think that's just a rather clever mechanic. Even if you may never even get to the later cards.

You know, I certainly haven't playing it with my son, but he loves playing it at the level we're at, and it's comforting knowing that we could keep playing it and it would just get more complicated, but he would be able to roll with it via the experience of playing with it at lower levels. I love that. Yeah, the games with a what what what do you call a slow learning curve or whatever? The games that are

easy to pick up and difficult to master. That seems like the sweet spot of what a game should be. If it's really great like that, you know that there is a lot of skill and strategy involved if you know what you're doing, But also it's not impossible to just get going and understand how the game works. All right, when we're gonna close it off there. But obviously you've all played board games or and or card games and various other games that fall under this loose category, and

we would love to hear from you about them. What are your favorites, what are your least favorites? Uh? Hey, have any of you played some variation on the ancient games that we've discussed here. The proposed rule systems are out there. You can find proposed rules for er UH and Senate online. So if you've done that, let us know what you thought of them. What was it like to to sit down and play some variation of this this ancient leisure activity. Did it make you feel like

a pharaoh? Maybe? So? As always, you can find the other episodes of Invention at at invention pod dot com. UH you'll find links to our social media accounts there. If you want to discuss the show and discuss your favorite board games and on Facebook, head on over to the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module. That's where listeners discuss our other shows Stuff to Blow your Mind, but also episodes of Invention. It's a good place to interact with other listeners and also with two of us.

Thanks to our friends Scott Benjamin for research assistance on this episode and to our excellent audio producer Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode, during the other to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.