In 1283, a team of scribes working for King Alfonso X of Castile finished a manuscript that game historians have been mining ever since: the Libro de los juegos, the Book of Games. Most of its hundred or so illuminated pages belong to chess. But tucked between the chess problems and the dice games sit [ ] The post Alquerque: The Moorish Game That Became Checkers appeared first on ancientgames.org…
On the morning of Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year, the game comes out before the food does. Four wooden sticks clatter onto a mat, someone shouts Mo! , and four generations of one family start arguing about whether to stack their pieces or split them. The game is Yut Nori ( ), and Koreans have been [ ] The post Yut Nori: Korea s New Year Race Game of Sticks and Horses appeared first on…
Macau is the largest gambling market in the world by gaming revenue — by a margin so wide that the second-largest market (the Las Vegas Strip) takes in less than a fifth of what Macau processes in a normal year. The reason is not chance. Macau is the only place in the Chinese-speaking world where [ ] The post Macau: From Portuguese Trading Port to Asia s Casino Capital appeared first on…
If you have ever played craps and wondered why the rules are so complicated — why a shooter rolls until something specific happens, why some numbers are naturals and others craps , why the language sounds half-medieval — the short answer is that craps is the simplified American version of an English game called Hazard, which [ ] The post Hazard: The Medieval Dice Game That Became Craps appeared…
In 1972, archaeologists excavating an aristocratic Han-dynasty tomb in Mawangdui, near Changsha in Hunan province, opened a sealed lacquer box and recovered what is now considered the most complete surviving set of one of the most important board games of ancient China. The set was a complete Liubo board, with twelve playing pieces, six bamboo [ ] The post Liubo: The Lost Han Dynasty Board Game…
Sic Bo s three-dice shaker is the visible end of a tradition that runs back at least two thousand years through Chinese gaming history — and the dice themselves are not even close to the oldest piece of that tradition. Long before cubic dice arrived in China from the Greco-Roman world, gambling in Han-dynasty courts ran [ ] The post Ancient Chinese Dice and Board Games: From Liubo to Sic Bo…
Most ancient board games are still playable today — sometimes through interactive web recreations, sometimes through downloadable mobile apps, sometimes through faithful reconstruction kits sold by museums. The tricky part is knowing which versions are historically accurate versus which are loose modern adaptations using the name. This guide covers the major ancient games we cover [ ] The post Can…
Humans have been wagering on uncertain outcomes for almost as long as recorded history. The oldest gaming dice ever found come from Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. Loaded dice — designed to cheat — have been excavated from Pompeii. The Bible references casting lots; Tang dynasty China ran state lotteries to fund the Great Wall; Roman [ ] The post Gambling in the Ancient World: From Mesopotamian Dice…
Three of the world s most-played strategic board games — chess, shogi, and xiangqi — share a single common ancestor: the Indian game of Chaturanga, played around 600 CE. From that root, the game travelled west through Persia and the Islamic world to become modern chess, east into China to become xiangqi, and from China to [ ] The post Chess vs Shogi vs Xiangqi: Three Paths from Chaturanga appeared…
Chess as we know it today — 64 squares, 32 pieces, fixed rules — was not invented. It was distilled. Over roughly 1,500 years, the game travelled from northern India through Persia, across the Islamic world, and into medieval Europe, picking up and shedding rules at every stop. The single moment most historians point to [ ] The post When Was Chess Invented? A Complete Timeline appeared first on…