Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of
Speaker 1: our discussion of the invention of board games. Now. In
Speaker 1: the last episode, we talked a lot about the i
Speaker 1: the idea of what play is and what games are
Speaker 1: and how they emerge from our biology, and the fact
Speaker 1: that this is still an open question. We talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of the evidence in the theories about why
Speaker 1: why play exists in animals, what purpose it serves, if
Speaker 1: it might be biologically adaptive in one way or another,
Speaker 1: the idea of that maybe it trains us for future skills,
Speaker 1: that maybe it signals fitness, that maybe it makes us
Speaker 1: more versatile and able to deal with unexpected events, and
Speaker 1: all kinds of things like that. We also talked about
Speaker 1: theories about why abstracted versions of play like board games emerged.
Speaker 1: That maybe it was in order to sublimate a competitive
Speaker 1: instinct that could be violent if not given an outlet
Speaker 1: like games, Yeah, don't punch each other in the face,
Speaker 1: play Little rockham Stock and robots instead, uh yeah. And
Speaker 1: and then also the idea that there is a deep
Speaker 1: inherent link between board games the earliest known board games
Speaker 1: and the practice of divination or sort of ledge, where
Speaker 1: you might do things like cast lots to figure out
Speaker 1: the will of the gods, or answer a question by
Speaker 1: consulting some type of pseudo random object or event. You know,
Speaker 1: you throw knuckle bones and see what the gods are
Speaker 1: telling you, or consult the each ing, and that these
Speaker 1: kinds of things could have given way to board games
Speaker 1: that also involve casting of lots or rolling of knucklebones
Speaker 1: to see how many spaces you get to move on
Speaker 1: the board, right, and we see that legacy continue in
Speaker 1: modern games. The Mystery Day, the Game of Life that
Speaker 1: we already mentioned, and though this is not technically a game,
Speaker 1: it is still kind of lumped into the same similar category.
Speaker 1: Certainly something you can buy at a toy store, but
Speaker 1: the magic eight ball. The magic eight ball is a
Speaker 1: toy that is obviously just overtly a divination tool, but
Speaker 1: one that as uh I thought, I would say, usually
Speaker 1: I don't know. I would say that even as a kid,
Speaker 1: when I used a magic eight ball, there was a
Speaker 1: sense of wanting it to be real, like there was
Speaker 1: a you leaned into the magic, into the the sort
Speaker 1: of the divine aspect of the practice, even though you
Speaker 1: knew that this was was not actually a you know,
Speaker 1: a hotline to the fates, or that God had anything
Speaker 1: to do with what was happening in the ball, Robert,
Speaker 1: do you hear that? Yeah? Whoa? What is that? Something
Speaker 1: kind of cutting in cuttle Cat's cuttlefish to the second
Speaker 1: oil age and his kingdom with whirl of darkness. I
Speaker 1: don't dispute the eurostata, but if he's down here, not
Speaker 1: blood but darkness, the Earth's black riches. No, I could
Speaker 1: taste it on my lips. Today, I want to talk
Speaker 1: to you about the science of transgenesis, tens genesis dot show. No,
Speaker 1: I guess it's gone now. Maybe it wasn't anything. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just heard like a high pitched, like like glitchy noise. Robert,
Speaker 1: you've got a bit of blood in the owner of
Speaker 1: your eye. Oh my goodness. I yeah, I'm I'm bleeding
Speaker 1: from rama. I want to get cleaned up here and
Speaker 1: we can keep going. I'm good, I'm good. Well, if
Speaker 1: I can get off topic for just a second here.
Speaker 1: Of course, I do think that there actually is that
Speaker 1: the eight ball and other divination methods like the Wegia
Speaker 1: board and all that. You know, we we can laugh
Speaker 1: at like the strict religious authorities and adults who say,
Speaker 1: don't fool around with the weedge board. You know, you're
Speaker 1: inviting demons in. Or they might say the same thing
Speaker 1: about the magic eight ball. On one hand, that's kind
Speaker 1: of funny. But on the other hand, of course, I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting like real spiritual demons actually come in and
Speaker 1: possess you if you play with a wigia board. I
Speaker 1: do think playing with a wigia board can be kind
Speaker 1: of dangerous because it suggests a divinatory frame of mind,
Speaker 1: even if you don't go in believing in it. I
Speaker 1: bet you've had this experience of playing around with something
Speaker 1: like this not believing it has any real magical power.
Speaker 1: But then once you've played the game, you kind of
Speaker 1: start to wonder, and it tempts you, attempts you to
Speaker 1: think in terms of fate, in terms of like the
Speaker 1: intervention of of other otherworldly forces in your life. If
Speaker 1: you play with it enough, I can see how it
Speaker 1: could really suck your mind into that cast of thinking,
Speaker 1: which can be harmful. Well even just um just you know,
Speaker 1: marginal exposure to something to that kind of thinking can
Speaker 1: have an effect. I think back to the episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind we did on the Chinese
Speaker 1: zodiac and uh, you know, with the lunar calendar, the
Speaker 1: different zodiac animals associated with each year, and the sort
Speaker 1: of the the loose too complicated characteristics that are aligned
Speaker 1: with individuals born in each year, and how you saw
Speaker 1: you when you look at the birth statistics, you see
Speaker 1: this this bump uh during the years of the Dragon,
Speaker 1: the most auspicious year. And and one of the things
Speaker 1: that we found is that this didn't you didn't see
Speaker 1: this occurring because necessarily people were just like hardcore Chinese
Speaker 1: astrology believers, but that they were there were other things,
Speaker 1: probably more important things of impacting their their choices, But
Speaker 1: then this thing was in the background, like a casual
Speaker 1: understanding of the zodiac, and then that ended up perhaps
Speaker 1: the argument is um uh influencing their choices. So just
Speaker 1: having something like the the eight ball or the Luigi board,
Speaker 1: or astrology or whatever supernatural model you want to lean on,
Speaker 1: just having there in the background can conceivably be enough
Speaker 1: to tweak your choices, you know. And I wonder if
Speaker 1: this can be extended into partly explaining why games of
Speaker 1: chance have sometimes historically and even sometimes by by a
Speaker 1: few people today, been considered dangerous because if there is
Speaker 1: this kind of danger, you know, even if there aren't
Speaker 1: really spirits that are gonna come mess with you, there
Speaker 1: is a kind of danger in setting your mind to
Speaker 1: the cast of thinking that is encouraged by divination methods,
Speaker 1: and that rolling dice to play a game of chance
Speaker 1: is in a way a form of divination. It is
Speaker 1: kind of a slightly abstracted sortilage practice. Now, I also
Speaker 1: want to remind everybody, since it, you know, may have
Speaker 1: been a week since you listen to the last episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk a little bit as we continue
Speaker 1: about sort of the what I'm thinking of the three
Speaker 1: corners of gaming that you're gonna have the mechanics of
Speaker 1: the game. That's the rules, the system of rules that
Speaker 1: dictate how it's played, the skeleton the skeleton ya, who wins,
Speaker 1: how they win, et cetera. Then you have the fluff, which,
Speaker 1: especially in modern games, this is the story, the characters,
Speaker 1: the setting, the illustration and illustrations. And then you have
Speaker 1: the material aspect of it, which could be as simple
Speaker 1: as a board and some sort of you know, a
Speaker 1: dice or it is something more elaborate, like it requires
Speaker 1: a poplematic bubble, or you know, the battleships set requires
Speaker 1: this whole plastic interface, etcetera. The Omega virus robots that
Speaker 1: talks to you and or the videotape you put in
Speaker 1: with the you the one who is moving now right,
Speaker 1: Or there are a lot of games you know nowadays,
Speaker 1: or there are a lot of games that have just
Speaker 1: required timers. You need that hour glass, right, But a
Speaker 1: lot of games now that either have a timing element
Speaker 1: or something more complicated than that will require you to
Speaker 1: use an app which which it can also be used
Speaker 1: to great effect. Well, I think we should then try
Speaker 1: to turn our attention to what is the earliest known
Speaker 1: evidence of physical apparatus for for these types of abstract
Speaker 1: games like board games. What's the earliest evidence we have
Speaker 1: that somebody was playing something like a board game. Well,
Speaker 1: when you start diving back through history, you find that
Speaker 1: some of the uh what is considered the earliest archaeological
Speaker 1: evidence for board games pops up in the Neolithic Middle
Speaker 1: East around seven thousand BC. Wow, board games nine thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. But this would have been the time in
Speaker 1: which individuals living in this region we're beginning to find
Speaker 1: social leisure and security on a regular basis for the
Speaker 1: first time. So they were feeling safe enough, they were
Speaker 1: feeling secure enough, and you know how much food they
Speaker 1: had available that they had, say, you know, a few
Speaker 1: minutes in the afternoon to scratch some a grid into
Speaker 1: the dirt and maybe move a few pebbles around. Now,
Speaker 1: I would think a grid scratched into the dirt would
Speaker 1: not survive nine thousand years. So what is the physical
Speaker 1: evidence we have that people were playing games like this
Speaker 1: at the time. Well, that is one of the key
Speaker 1: the key challenges because we tend to find what might
Speaker 1: be the boards or the pieces, and sometimes it can
Speaker 1: be difficult to figure out exactly what we're looking at,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Indeed, if it's something as simple as
Speaker 1: pegs and stone owns, or little holes drilled in stones,
Speaker 1: or some sort of a grid and stones, there's a
Speaker 1: fair amount of interpretation figuring out why people made these marks.
Speaker 1: Um And certainly we're not going to find anything like
Speaker 1: the rules for ancient game. If if you have a
Speaker 1: game that is predating written language, there is no rule
Speaker 1: book to go by. It would have just been an
Speaker 1: oral tradition. So it's not always easy to say, yes,
Speaker 1: this was probably part of a game, this was something
Speaker 1: that served litteral or no purpose outside of leisure. For instance,
Speaker 1: there's the Neolithic Beta site, which dates back to somewhere
Speaker 1: between seventy two hundred and sixty b C. And it's
Speaker 1: near Petra, Jordan's Uh and this is one of many
Speaker 1: ancient sites where we have we find stone slabs with
Speaker 1: three parallel rows of regular holes, and this might have
Speaker 1: been an early precursor to Mancala, which is of course
Speaker 1: one of the world's most ancient games and one that
Speaker 1: we still find versions of throughout the world. You can
Speaker 1: usually buy it at a store or even I remember
Speaker 1: a version of Mancola got popular at my school. I
Speaker 1: think when I was in I don't know, something like
Speaker 1: sixth grade. Does that sound about right. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that it has come backs occasionally. Yeah. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 1: of these you just see. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: owned a copy, but you you see it around like
Speaker 1: it's for something with such ancient origins, it's still very
Speaker 1: much alive. Basically, it involves like you get to go
Speaker 1: along a series of holes or impressions, dropping in seeds
Speaker 1: or stones, one at a time and like counting out
Speaker 1: the number of places you get to go. Right, it's
Speaker 1: generally a colored beads nowadays, but but the older model
Speaker 1: would have probably used seeds or beans, and this might
Speaker 1: reveal its origins as a fertility ritual for early agricultural societies.
Speaker 1: Again getting into a little bit into the divination and
Speaker 1: a little get into the magical perhaps origins of games.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting the idea. Yeah, so seeds, agriculture and fertility,
Speaker 1: but also having perhaps some kind of divinatory role exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, these were pretty white, widespread, to the point
Speaker 1: that mencla games are are even a whole category of
Speaker 1: ancient games in some classifications. Now there are different classifications
Speaker 1: for for games and board games that you'll find depending
Speaker 1: on who the scholar is that's doing the analysis. But
Speaker 1: for instance, Harold James Ruthren Murray is one of the
Speaker 1: individuals who categorized games, and he said, okay, well we
Speaker 1: have men calla games, that's a category. But then he
Speaker 1: had other games, for instance, alignment and configuration games. The
Speaker 1: most obvious example of this is tic tac toe Connect
Speaker 1: four Connect four I think would probably count basic principles
Speaker 1: the same. You have war games. Of course, the classic
Speaker 1: example there is chess, but you can throw in your
Speaker 1: warhammer games, you can throw in your risk games. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are all essentially games that simulate warfare. Then they're
Speaker 1: hunting games. I don't think I've played one of these,
Speaker 1: or at least I don't think I have. But Fox
Speaker 1: and Geese is an example that pops up in different cultures.
Speaker 1: This was the hardest category for me to understand. I
Speaker 1: think maybe it involves sort of like collecting pieces, like
Speaker 1: you compete to collect them or something. Yeah, it kind
Speaker 1: of makes more sense if you if you look at
Speaker 1: a picture of it. So if you do a search
Speaker 1: for fox and Geese games, you'll see some some images.
Speaker 1: Then there are race games, and the prime example here
Speaker 1: is backgammon. I don't think I've ever played backgammon, so
Speaker 1: I don't actually know how you do it. Well, it's
Speaker 1: it's a pretty ancient game that but is also apparently
Speaker 1: a descendant of the two row Roman dice game twelve lines,
Speaker 1: which itself was based on older forms of the same mechanic.
Speaker 1: And this is something you see with a lot of
Speaker 1: these games. It's just this continual evolution of form games
Speaker 1: are passed on almost virally from culture to culture, and
Speaker 1: new spins are put on them because for a certain
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, especially when they're when it's just
Speaker 1: oral tradition. Uh, you know, it's going it's like a
Speaker 1: game of telephone, but with the game rules levels of
Speaker 1: complexity and simplification altering across the centuries. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the key insights of the study of
Speaker 1: games is that games are just are not fixed. They
Speaker 1: always change. Yeah, like even something like Monopoly, which we'll
Speaker 1: we'll get into more later, but it's easy for me,
Speaker 1: especially to think, Okay, Monopoly, is this awful game that
Speaker 1: never changes. Oh yeah, we learned that last time you
Speaker 1: hate Monopoly. Hate Monopoly. Yeah, you go to the store
Speaker 1: and there's some new version of Monopoly and it's the
Speaker 1: same version of Monopoly, different pictures. They just tweaked the
Speaker 1: fluff like that. You can even get Warhammer Monopoly, Star
Speaker 1: Wars Monopoly. Yeah. But but even but I say that,
Speaker 1: but deuced Bigelow Monopoly. I say this, but I was
Speaker 1: just talking to Scott Benjamin, who helped us research this episode,
Speaker 1: and he pointed out that actually you do see evolution
Speaker 1: in Monopoly. There's a millennial Monopoly that came out where
Speaker 1: they've altered the rules, not only the fluff, but the
Speaker 1: rules itself to indicate that you're not you're not buying things,
Speaker 1: you're renning things, and then of course they're there's also
Speaker 1: like a card game based of Monopoly. There are other
Speaker 1: games with the same franchise and similar fluff. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: if you're renting them, how do you how do you
Speaker 1: what do your sublease when people land on your tiles
Speaker 1: on the board. I don't know. Uh, community chest is
Speaker 1: replaced with like take a puff of the jewel. Well,
Speaker 1: as long as the as long as the game ends
Speaker 1: the same way all Monopoly games end, and that is
Speaker 1: with friends mad at each other, that's all that counts.
Speaker 1: That's not my experience. That's my experience with risk because
Speaker 1: that risk makes people hate each other. Okay, I never
Speaker 1: played risk. I had friends who are really into it.
Speaker 1: But that's one that also goes really long, right it can,
Speaker 1: and risk risk is like the number one offender for
Speaker 1: for outing table flippers, for you know, letting you know
Speaker 1: which are your friends is actually a really bad sport
Speaker 1: to find out through risk. Yeah, you know, thinking back
Speaker 1: to Monopoly, and then I think, you know, I had
Speaker 1: friends who were playing risk too, Is that part of it.
Speaker 1: It's like a really long game that's played at night
Speaker 1: in many cases, and so you've just been doing it
Speaker 1: for so long, you're tired, you need to go home,
Speaker 1: you need to go to sleep, You're still stuck in
Speaker 1: this low stakes um b s And then yeah, eventually
Speaker 1: you just gotta flip the table. Elements make it worse.
Speaker 1: Most often, i'd say, played for a long time at
Speaker 1: night by adult men who have maybe been consuming alcohol.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, it's a bad scene and will let
Speaker 1: the demons in for sure. All right, well, let's take
Speaker 1: a break, and when we come back, we're going to
Speaker 1: roll into some some specific examples, some more specific examples
Speaker 1: of ancient games and and really we can learn a
Speaker 1: lot about just the nature of board games in general
Speaker 1: by looking at what we know and what we don't
Speaker 1: know about these ancient pastimes. All right, we're back now.
Speaker 1: Earlier we talked about the idea that there is perhaps
Speaker 1: physical evidence of some type of unidentified Neolithic board game
Speaker 1: just been found in like near Petra in Jordan's that
Speaker 1: was perhaps a form of the Moncola game type but
Speaker 1: we don't know for sure, and that that was maybe
Speaker 1: like seven thousand b C or nine thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: The oldest game that we definitely really know about on
Speaker 1: are sure it's a game we have direct archaeological evidence of,
Speaker 1: is a game from ancient Egypt called senate. That's right,
Speaker 1: also known as the game of thirty squares, also known
Speaker 1: as the game of passing, which will get back to later.
Speaker 1: I think that's what senate actually means, is passing. So
Speaker 1: the dates range on this, So I've seen dates that
Speaker 1: that say Senate goes back to roughly three thousand BC. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen that there's evidence trace to BC or basically
Speaker 1: roughly the fourth millennium BC. Either way, it was played
Speaker 1: in pre dynastic times, and we can even turn to
Speaker 1: tomb paintings that that actually depict ancient Egyptians playing this
Speaker 1: game during this time period. Yeah. One famous one is
Speaker 1: an ancient Egyptian painting of Queen Nefertari, one of the
Speaker 1: wives of Rams. He's the great, and this painting of
Speaker 1: Nefertory playing Senet is within the queen's own tomb, so
Speaker 1: in her tomb in the Valley of Queens and Thebes
Speaker 1: there's a painting of her playing a board game. That's dedication.
Speaker 1: I mean she was probably nationally ranked. Well yeah, probably
Speaker 1: so now when you look at this illustration, I've actually
Speaker 1: seen this illustration wrongfully identified as her playing chess. That's
Speaker 1: not correct. Chess wouldn't come about for another four thousand
Speaker 1: years in India, and I think that's worth remembering too.
Speaker 1: By the time chess was invented, games like this were
Speaker 1: more ancient than chess is now. Yeah, that's unbelievable. I
Speaker 1: love putting ancient history in that kind of perspective, like
Speaker 1: thinking about the things, the things in ancient Egypt that
Speaker 1: we're older to the ancient Romans than ancient Rome is
Speaker 1: to us. That's always something I'd like to keep in perspective. Um,
Speaker 1: But so what do we know about this games net?
Speaker 1: We know it was played with multiple game pieces, So
Speaker 1: there were these things that look kind of like ponds
Speaker 1: that were sometimes made of like a blue type ceramic material,
Speaker 1: and it was played on a grid of thirty squares.
Speaker 1: There were three rows of ten squares, and several of
Speaker 1: the squares had symbolic hieroglyphs on them, seemingly symbolizing game imagery.
Speaker 1: Such as the water Trap, like there'd be a water square.
Speaker 1: And while our evidence of synet is often in the
Speaker 1: form of elaborate game boxes used by the wealthy, it
Speaker 1: speculated that the game could also have been played by
Speaker 1: the poor simply by drawing a grid in the sand,
Speaker 1: or by like making scratches on a rock or a board.
Speaker 1: And this is something we we see with some of
Speaker 1: the later games we're going to discuss, where you had
Speaker 1: the ornate version with a little in a box underneath
Speaker 1: it to keep the pieces in. But then you also
Speaker 1: see evidence of graffiti versions where someone just scrawled it
Speaker 1: on on stone and played it exactly. Now, the exact
Speaker 1: rules for Senate, though, are ultimately just a matter of
Speaker 1: conject Sure, yeah we know something sort of, but we
Speaker 1: don't fully know how the game was originally played, right,
Speaker 1: And you can just imagine this exercise taking various modern
Speaker 1: games and imagine, you know, opening them and having absolutely
Speaker 1: no instructions, no written language about how they were played.
Speaker 1: In some cases you can pretty much piece it together.
Speaker 1: Fireball Island, candy Candy Land, especially Snakes and Ladders or
Speaker 1: Shoots and Ladders. These are games that you know, you
Speaker 1: can you can figure it out pretty quickly. Other games
Speaker 1: with more you know, ambiguity is harder to tell, right
Speaker 1: if you took a box of Arkham Horror. And it's
Speaker 1: hard enough to tell what you're supposed to do in
Speaker 1: Arkham Horror when you have the rules, but if you
Speaker 1: have no rules, I can imagine there would be different
Speaker 1: models based on it. Well, we think it was played
Speaker 1: this way. We think these tiles were possibly used in
Speaker 1: this way shape or form. Future archaeologists five thousand years
Speaker 1: from now are definitely going to be able to figure
Speaker 1: out how to play cross Fire because that's just obvious.
Speaker 1: You can't miss it. Yeah, hungry hungry hippos. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: another one though. Of course, you can determine some things,
Speaker 1: as we're saying, just by looking at what the what
Speaker 1: we've been talking about is the materials of the game are.
Speaker 1: What are the things you have to work with. It's
Speaker 1: believed that this game Senate was played by casting of
Speaker 1: some equivalent of dice, maybe casting knucklebones or throwing sticks,
Speaker 1: and this would help determine what kind of moves you
Speaker 1: could make. Knucklebones, by the way, often these would be
Speaker 1: a knucklebones from say a sheep or a goat. So
Speaker 1: something that was regularly slaughtered and and used for to
Speaker 1: manufacture items, and it would be something more like a
Speaker 1: four sided dice, like a D four in modern gaming terms.
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure, but I would have to
Speaker 1: guess that that would mean it's it's the biological shape
Speaker 1: would mean it's not quite perfectly random which number you get,
Speaker 1: like there is actually a bias towards some of the
Speaker 1: faces of the dice, since it's not, you know, perfectly
Speaker 1: machined to be equal. That's a good point, but I
Speaker 1: don't know that that just seems likely to me. One
Speaker 1: of the really interesting things about Senate is how this
Speaker 1: game held sacred connotations for the ancient Egyptians, Like it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Nefertari has shown
Speaker 1: playing the game in a painting within her own tomb.
Speaker 1: Uh The pharaoh Tutton Common was also buried with Senate
Speaker 1: game boxes among his grave goods to be taken into
Speaker 1: the next life. And we mentioned earlier that the name
Speaker 1: of the game means passing. It's the game of passing,
Speaker 1: and this probably has significance on the board itself, because
Speaker 1: it's believed that you played the game by sort of
Speaker 1: advancing past your opponent along the squares, and you could
Speaker 1: like pass your opponent, you could block your opponent. So
Speaker 1: it is in some ways literally a game of passing
Speaker 1: in terms of its mechanics. But Senate also seems to
Speaker 1: hold this strong religious significance associated with death, which for
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians meant passing on into the afterlife through
Speaker 1: this cosmic journey. I know, Robert, you've talked about that
Speaker 1: on stuff to blow your mind before. You know, the
Speaker 1: beliefs about the journey of the dead among the ancient Egyptians,
Speaker 1: where you'd adventure through the nether world. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: just a matter of your going off to something we
Speaker 1: would think of as sort of a modern paradise. There's
Speaker 1: like trials, their trials and could you know, continued adventures
Speaker 1: and adversaries in the in the Egyptian afterlife, And that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that the departed has to bring
Speaker 1: all this stuff with them, Like some of it, they're
Speaker 1: bringing things they like, but they're also bringing things they
Speaker 1: will need exactly, and so it may serve some purpose
Speaker 1: to like, uh, I mean, I'm thinking about passing time
Speaker 1: in the afterlife. They're all these. Uh I don't know
Speaker 1: if this is just a curious feature of English and
Speaker 1: in how these ironies are stacking up. But so this
Speaker 1: is a game which, like the idea of a game
Speaker 1: in ancient India often meant you know that they literally
Speaker 1: meant time passing, like the passing of time in a game.
Speaker 1: Uh So games are for in a way passing time.
Speaker 1: The mechanics of the game involved passing players is the
Speaker 1: game of passing, and the meaning of the game spiritually
Speaker 1: has to do with passing into immortality. Huh. Interesting, boy,
Speaker 1: there's probably a lot you could do was just looking
Speaker 1: at how different board games interpret linear and cyclical time
Speaker 1: um or both to some extent, you know, of taking
Speaker 1: taking our existence and piecing them out into step by step.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean this is so if this game
Speaker 1: in some way is presented as a model of something
Speaker 1: that these people believed actually happened to them. We still
Speaker 1: have games like that today. I mean we were talking
Speaker 1: earlier about the game of life. I mean, the game
Speaker 1: of life in many ways you could think of as
Speaker 1: a kind of um like normative model formation engine. For like,
Speaker 1: this is what a life looks like. You you know,
Speaker 1: go to college, you get a job and you start
Speaker 1: a family, and the Game of Life kind of enforces
Speaker 1: that by having you go through these motions over and
Speaker 1: over again. It's all there in the fluff, like all
Speaker 1: the normative things that are being suggested about what life
Speaker 1: should be like. Perhaps Senator is the same way. I mean,
Speaker 1: when thinking about the religious details of the game, I
Speaker 1: started to wonder about if some part of the purpose
Speaker 1: of the game was not necessarily to have the negative
Speaker 1: connotations of this word, but propagandistic, to spread particular ideas
Speaker 1: through a catchy and inherently fun medium. It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: the only game that did this right. We just mentioned
Speaker 1: the Game of Life, but think about Monopoly. Even though
Speaker 1: it's one of the most popular board games in modern history,
Speaker 1: Monopoly has its roots like thoroughly in pushing a particular
Speaker 1: point of view. Specifically, it was created in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds by our writer, inventor and progressive activist named
Speaker 1: Lizzie Maghee or Maggie m. A. G I. E. And
Speaker 1: Maghee invented it specifically to illustrate the dangers and evils
Speaker 1: of monopolies, of wealth accumulation and of these like rent
Speaker 1: seeking barons that you become in the game. It's ironic
Speaker 1: because Monopoly has been in a very simple way. It
Speaker 1: kind of glorifies this idea of the of the mustachioed
Speaker 1: rich man. That's the funny thing that originally wasn't supposed
Speaker 1: to It was supposed to do the opposite. The original
Speaker 1: title of her game was The Landlord's Game, and Mage
Speaker 1: summed it up summed up her goal to a reporter
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six by saying, quote, in a short time,
Speaker 1: I hope a very short time, men and women will
Speaker 1: discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller maybe
Speaker 1: have more than they know what to do with. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: that is directly the opposite of the message if you
Speaker 1: want to say that modern monopoly has it is directly
Speaker 1: the opposite of the message monopoly. Well, I think it
Speaker 1: would depend on how you frame it. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: people don't tend to take that away, do that. Well,
Speaker 1: what's the monopoly guy's name? He has a name? Right?
Speaker 1: These Mr money Bags? Right? Mr money Bags looks too
Speaker 1: cute and adorable, Like he needs to he needs to
Speaker 1: have more of this gnaar Old Ebenezer Scrooge like vibe
Speaker 1: to him, you know, wearing like a necklace of bones
Speaker 1: and yeah all that. Yeah, it needs to be less this.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, he needs to be less cute and needs
Speaker 1: to be grotesque in some fashion, like like the real
Speaker 1: Ultra rich are. Well, they had to make the game
Speaker 1: friendly to children. That's where they went wrong. But a
Speaker 1: funny thing also about the game is that she was
Speaker 1: apparently interested it and using it to promote Georgian economics,
Speaker 1: the set of ideas stemming from the economist Henry George.
Speaker 1: Did you did you know about this problem? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: basically George suggested that people should not be taxed. I
Speaker 1: think this is the basic form. People shouldn't be taxed
Speaker 1: on the income from the work they do, but instead
Speaker 1: should be taxed so that the spoils of land ownership
Speaker 1: and subsequently like natural resources and rent and everything are
Speaker 1: distributed equally among everyone. So you can't make money just
Speaker 1: by owning land or by owning a mine or something
Speaker 1: like that. Instead, you can only make money on the
Speaker 1: work you do. But Monopoly is a game in which
Speaker 1: that's what you do. You just acquired things and just
Speaker 1: money comes in because so you're playing as the bad
Speaker 1: guy in monopoly. But again, it gets you know, it
Speaker 1: gets kind of you start thinking about it backwards. But anyway,
Speaker 1: of course, the game became wildly popular, especially in these
Speaker 1: derivative forms, for for which other game designers apparently claimed credit.
Speaker 1: But it didn't necessarily teach the players, as we're saying,
Speaker 1: all the things that make you hope it would. And
Speaker 1: so this is something else to consider that It's widely agreed,
Speaker 1: as we were saying earlier, that the rules of games
Speaker 1: change over time. You know, games don't stay fixed, they evolve.
Speaker 1: And I want to pair that with the fact that
Speaker 1: you don't often have to put much effort at all
Speaker 1: into a task to make it feel like a game.
Speaker 1: Just framing it as a game can be effective and
Speaker 1: making it feel fun and like a game. And this
Speaker 1: has been demonstrated by empirical research. You know, the whole
Speaker 1: Tom Sawyer painting the Fence trick. You know, this is
Speaker 1: a great game where you paint the fence, uh, and
Speaker 1: everybody wants to get in on it. Apparently there's some
Speaker 1: research that shows this is true. I was looking at
Speaker 1: a study from in the journal Games and Culture by
Speaker 1: Andreas liber Off that is called shallow gamification, testing psychological
Speaker 1: effects of framing and activity as a game, and I
Speaker 1: found you know, you don't really have to do much
Speaker 1: work to make something into a game. You just sort
Speaker 1: of call it a game and get the basic basically
Speaker 1: frame it as a game, and people will enjoy it
Speaker 1: as if it is a game. So anyway, my my
Speaker 1: crazy series of thoughts here is I wonder if games,
Speaker 1: maybe like sent It as an example, could be created
Speaker 1: to teach or model or advocate a particular view of
Speaker 1: the world, a political view of the world, a religious
Speaker 1: view of the world, creating some kind of normative model
Speaker 1: of how people should see things or how people should
Speaker 1: behavior act, but later end up spreading and remaining popular
Speaker 1: simply because the game mechanics are fun. And then the
Speaker 1: fluff loses meaning or gets shed or gets changed over time,
Speaker 1: sort of like happened with Monopoly. Yeah yeah, well this
Speaker 1: would be a discussion for another time. But like you do,
Speaker 1: wonder what does a particular country or regions popular game forms?
Speaker 1: What does that say about them? Like what does MONOPOLYI
Speaker 1: say about the US? And I think it's unfair to
Speaker 1: have that be our game, but what what what does
Speaker 1: monopolies popular to say about the United States? What does
Speaker 1: say uh, settlers of Catan and other German and European
Speaker 1: design games. What do they say about mainland Europe? Does
Speaker 1: the popularity of Warhammer forty say about the United Kingdom?
Speaker 1: Is that where it comes from? Um? And then again
Speaker 1: these are Perhaps this would be an attempt to read
Speaker 1: too much into a game's popularity, but but at the
Speaker 1: same time, I do agree that I think there there
Speaker 1: is some sort of influence taking place. Like you to
Speaker 1: to engage in in a game, to engage in a
Speaker 1: system of a game's rules, Uh, you're really putting your
Speaker 1: head in and you're putting your taking your thought process
Speaker 1: and forcing it to mimic the the systematic layout of
Speaker 1: the game. Yes, but as we're seeing it seems like
Speaker 1: if the game is fun, it's possible that the layout
Speaker 1: of the game, you know, the thing that maybe even
Speaker 1: it was intended to teach or put you in the
Speaker 1: frame of mind of that can all be lost, can
Speaker 1: all be changed. It's possible that Sinet is something that's
Speaker 1: created for a kind of normative cultural purpose. In nah
Speaker 1: in Egypt, it serves to teach something about their religion
Speaker 1: and their society and all that. But because it's a
Speaker 1: fun game, it spreads to other societies for which these
Speaker 1: meanings don't really carry over, right, So they're just that
Speaker 1: they're just stuck with the mechanics. Yeah, and uh, and
Speaker 1: that's what they can continues to live on. I mean,
Speaker 1: another way of thinking about this could be the original
Speaker 1: forms of chess were you know what. Therefore, perhaps they
Speaker 1: were for trying to like teach a military mindset to
Speaker 1: young knights or something like that, but you know, that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily what they're for now. It just turns out
Speaker 1: that the mechanics of the game are too fun to
Speaker 1: be contained, and they survived their original cultural context or meaning.
Speaker 1: So now we're gonna be talking about the Royal Game
Speaker 1: of Her, another ancient game from thousands of years ago.
Speaker 1: We last time we talked about the Egyptian board game Senate.
Speaker 1: That this is a um somewhat similar game, though it's different.
Speaker 1: Senate was a game of thirty squares that were lined
Speaker 1: up in three rows of ten squares and you somehow
Speaker 1: advanced along the squares and tried to pass your opponent
Speaker 1: or is somewhat different. But it's also a game of squares, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's basically two square grids connected by this little bridge.
Speaker 1: So you have a three by two grid, and then
Speaker 1: you have a three by four grid, and then you
Speaker 1: have a two square horizontal bridge connecting the two and um,
Speaker 1: I we said the name of this is the Game
Speaker 1: of Er. And I believe if anyone who's listened to
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind, you might remember that we've
Speaker 1: in the past mentioned the Great Ziggurat of Er. Well,
Speaker 1: it's the same Er so in what is now southern
Speaker 1: iraq Um. And to be clear, evidence of the Game
Speaker 1: of Er dates to the same time period as the
Speaker 1: Great Pyramid of Giza. We're talking b C. I think
Speaker 1: I've we've also seen twenty hundred BC as a date
Speaker 1: for the Game of Er. Okay, so almost as ancient
Speaker 1: a senate. Yeah yeah, pretty old. Now we're not again.
Speaker 1: This is another one where we're not exactly sure how
Speaker 1: the game was played with this curious board, but different
Speaker 1: scholars have weighed in to suggest how the pieces moved
Speaker 1: might have moved, and how they might have be been
Speaker 1: battled in the narrow channel between the smaller and greater grids.
Speaker 1: Game historian Andrea Becker believes that the origins of the
Speaker 1: game might have been a form of divination. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that again, Yeah, with the specific boards related to specific
Speaker 1: sorts of divination. What's more, she argues that they might
Speaker 1: have also served as a way to teach divination. So
Speaker 1: that's interest. So instead of teaching, um, you know, some
Speaker 1: sort of economic model. Uh, it's about teaching someone how
Speaker 1: to divine the future. Huh. Well, so now I'm seeing
Speaker 1: three ways that you can have a relationship between ancient
Speaker 1: board games and divination methods. So you could have one
Speaker 1: one route that's just derivative. Right, You've got divination methods
Speaker 1: where so you throw knucklebones to get an answer from
Speaker 1: the gods, and then you also realize that that can
Speaker 1: be used to determine outcomes in an abstract scenario, which
Speaker 1: is like a game. So it's just derivative of divination.
Speaker 1: Another router connection here would be that it's used to
Speaker 1: teach divination. A third would be that it is a
Speaker 1: form of divination, that the board game itself is a
Speaker 1: method of consulting the gods. Yeah, I mean it gets
Speaker 1: into the whole situation like is any battle game Is
Speaker 1: it a battle? Is it a simulation of the battle?
Speaker 1: Is it is it preparing you to simulate or take
Speaker 1: place in a battle. Yes, it derivative from battle principles.
Speaker 1: Is it designed to teach you battle or is it
Speaker 1: actually a form of battle that's supposed to decide something exactly? Now,
Speaker 1: one of the cool things about Earth is that eventually
Speaker 1: we did get some codified writings about how it is played. Uh,
Speaker 1: not so clear apparently that there's not a lot of
Speaker 1: continued discussion about exactly how it was played. And of
Speaker 1: course how it was played probably changed over time, right,
Speaker 1: but many centuries after it's it's introduction, you did have
Speaker 1: a clay tablet from one seventy seven b C. That
Speaker 1: that raid in on how to play it. And it's
Speaker 1: a rare exception to the lost history nature of of
Speaker 1: board game designers, because uh, if accounts are true. Uh,
Speaker 1: And of course we have to sort of flat grain
Speaker 1: of salt when we're talking about individuals described as doing
Speaker 1: things in ancient texts. But um, the rules for for
Speaker 1: this game were codified by the Babylonian scholar inscribe Itty Mar,
Speaker 1: Duke of Balatu in one s b c. And he
Speaker 1: even added new features which Brian fagan Um in his
Speaker 1: book said, quote enliven it for the contemporary gambler. So
Speaker 1: I'm assuming that means play mechanics and not mere fluff.
Speaker 1: But there is a there is a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: fluff to this game actually, and the fluff, I would say,
Speaker 1: seems to coincide with the idea that the game was
Speaker 1: used for divination related purposes, maybe to teach divination or
Speaker 1: maybe actually as a form of divination associated with astrology. Right,
Speaker 1: that's right. So a man by the name of Irving
Speaker 1: Finkel with the British Museum, I believe he translated the
Speaker 1: Cuneiform and believed that while there were strong astrological aspects
Speaker 1: to or, he believed it was still primarily a game.
Speaker 1: So that the so the astrology was fluff as opposed to, uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's primary purpose in society. But the fluff is
Speaker 1: really interesting. Like I looked up some of this writing
Speaker 1: and translation work by Irving Finkel on the quine form
Speaker 1: of the the original board. And so what the evidence
Speaker 1: shows is that the squares of the board were often
Speaker 1: labeled in a way that caused the game board to
Speaker 1: produce prediction statements as you played it. Uh, And this
Speaker 1: is from Irving Finkel, And so you'd have these ways
Speaker 1: that the game board could produce sort of a sentence,
Speaker 1: but it would also be associated with an astrological sign.
Speaker 1: So so you could have the game board say one
Speaker 1: who sits in a tavern, or I will pour out
Speaker 1: the dregs for you. Or you will find a friend,
Speaker 1: or you will stand in exalted places, or you will
Speaker 1: be powerful like a lion, or you will go up
Speaker 1: the path. Uh. There are a bunch of interesting ones,
Speaker 1: like one who weighs up silver. I love these there.
Speaker 1: They make the game feel very creepy and elemental. Or
Speaker 1: the one that says you will cut meat. You will
Speaker 1: cut meat. That's a great one. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Does that mean? Is that good neat? Like I will
Speaker 1: I will have a feast in my honor and I
Speaker 1: will give you the one to cut it. Or is
Speaker 1: it more like I will work at the butcher's shop.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You will cut meat? Apparently it's associated
Speaker 1: with the astrological sign of Aquarius. Uh. And there are
Speaker 1: other similarities like that, like you will be powerful like
Speaker 1: a lion is associated with the sign of Leo. That
Speaker 1: gets really interesting because you know, we we can think
Speaker 1: about ourselves, we can think of modern humans and for us,
Speaker 1: divination practices can be fun. Again, going back to the
Speaker 1: idea of the something like a fortune cookie at an
Speaker 1: American Chinese restaurant or magic eight ball, magic eight ball
Speaker 1: or you know what's actually also at the intersection of
Speaker 1: a game and a divination practice is you remember the
Speaker 1: game MASH that the kids would play in elementary school
Speaker 1: and stuff. Um, are you talking about with the folding paper? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, well, I think it was MASH. I think
Speaker 1: stands for mansion, apartment, shock house. And so it would
Speaker 1: be a thing where you'd have a number of options
Speaker 1: for different things that could come out of it. So
Speaker 1: you'd be like, who will you marry, and then you'd
Speaker 1: give like four options. And then the thing that you'd
Speaker 1: use some kind of pseudo random procedure to generate a
Speaker 1: number that would like have you go through the list
Speaker 1: counting a certain number of places to like rule out
Speaker 1: answers until you got to the end, and the end
Speaker 1: would give you some combination of possible answers. It would
Speaker 1: be like you will live in a mansion and you'll
Speaker 1: be married to Tim Curry and you know, etcetera. Interesting. So, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the fun side to divination. But even today people
Speaker 1: people get taken in by by divination uh, and it
Speaker 1: can be a very stressful, a very serious situation that
Speaker 1: you can you know, people can lose a lot of
Speaker 1: money investing in divination. But then likewise, gaming is much
Speaker 1: the same. Games can be a lot of fun, but
Speaker 1: if you're playing the wrong game, you're playing with the
Speaker 1: wrong people, or you're playing with the wrong attitude, games
Speaker 1: can be a seriously unpleasant experience. Yeah, okay, we just
Speaker 1: got a Mash update from Tari outside the booth here.
Speaker 1: Apparently Tari was a big MASH fan, and she says,
Speaker 1: one important part we left out is that you've got
Speaker 1: to add bad options in your mash list. So it's like,
Speaker 1: I guess the shock and Mash. You also like, if
Speaker 1: you have potential husbands you'll marry one of them has
Speaker 1: got to be a really like lame, ugly guy. Uh
Speaker 1: so that you'll end up with funny combinations. She says,
Speaker 1: So maybe you're living in a mansion, but you're married
Speaker 1: to pee wee herman. You know, this reminds me a
Speaker 1: little bit of of of a card game that I've
Speaker 1: really enjoyed playing recently called Gloomy and uses these transparent
Speaker 1: cards that actually have a mechanical purpose in the game.
Speaker 1: But essentially you have these cards that indicate different members
Speaker 1: of your sort of Edward gory uh style family. And
Speaker 1: then you want to have the most miserable family that
Speaker 1: dies in horror. Oh you told me about this, and
Speaker 1: and so and so. What you try to do is
Speaker 1: to make sure your family has the most horrible experience
Speaker 1: possib bull and dies off. Meanwhile bestowing um, you know,
Speaker 1: happy things upon the other. So, so you want your
Speaker 1: family members to say, catch some awful plague and drown
Speaker 1: in a well. But then you want members of the
Speaker 1: opposing families to say, for Alic with a kitten or
Speaker 1: something like that. So mash is the mash is complex.
Speaker 1: It's got to include both possible outcomes. Right, it's part
Speaker 1: gloom and it's part mirror, mirror on the wall. It's
Speaker 1: like part giving you all the stuff you want to hear.
Speaker 1: And then also it's got to throw in some bad
Speaker 1: news to make it real. All right, well, let's let's
Speaker 1: bring it back to her here. Uh, there's at least
Speaker 1: one theory that or eventually evolved into backgammon. So again
Speaker 1: we see this time and time again with these old games,
Speaker 1: like looking at the possible lines that connected them and
Speaker 1: then also kind of like like species, like like actual organisms.
Speaker 1: You see examples where one game was kind of killed
Speaker 1: off by another. You had like an invasive game come
Speaker 1: from another culture, and everyone's like, whoa, why aren't we
Speaker 1: playing this when we could be playing that? And then
Speaker 1: a game dies. But another interesting thing that Finkel brought
Speaker 1: up is a that that it likely used what we're
Speaker 1: known as astro gals, and these would have been those
Speaker 1: four sighted dice made from the knucklebones of sheep or goats. Again,
Speaker 1: it's it's so fascinating to think of many modern board
Speaker 1: and dice games as the tail end of something that
Speaker 1: began and perhaps divination maps and rattled animal bones. You know. Uh,
Speaker 1: in this sense, all games are potentially occult exercises. By
Speaker 1: the way, Finkel apparently has a couple of books about
Speaker 1: out about ancient board games that feature rules and punch
Speaker 1: out boards and spinners, so, you know, so younger players
Speaker 1: especially can can try out at least versions of what
Speaker 1: some of these ancient games could have consisted of. We
Speaker 1: gotta wonder, like, what are the best games lost to history?
Speaker 1: You we know that there must have been lots of
Speaker 1: games that we don't even really know anything about, or
Speaker 1: maybe only have a hint of. We don't know all
Speaker 1: the rules that could be a most fun game ever,
Speaker 1: they could be so addictive, and we do. We just
Speaker 1: don't know what they are. Because there's of course an
Speaker 1: endless possible combination of rules you can come up with
Speaker 1: for moving pieces around on a board. Maybe there's like
Speaker 1: the ultimate perfect game out there, and it's totally unknown.
Speaker 1: What if they they basically had Space Hulk Babylonian times,
Speaker 1: because again coming back to what I said, there's no
Speaker 1: reason you couldn't have a game with the exact same
Speaker 1: mechanics as Space Hulk, take place in an ancient setting.
Speaker 1: But I thought what was a major part of the
Speaker 1: appeal of Space Hulk was the fluff, Like you like
Speaker 1: the illustrations in the setting and all that. Right, I do.
Speaker 1: But then, but Space Hulk also has this wonderful mechanic
Speaker 1: where you have to you have to force. You have
Speaker 1: the humans who are superpowered and tough, but then you
Speaker 1: have the Horde, and the Horde that so the timing
Speaker 1: is different. So when the humans go, when the human
Speaker 1: player goes, uh, they have a time limit. They have
Speaker 1: a certain amount of time in which they have to
Speaker 1: make all their moves and use all of their movement points,
Speaker 1: but the player controlling the the alien horror of the
Speaker 1: Gene Steelers, they have all the time they need. So
Speaker 1: I do feel like there's something primal and attractive in
Speaker 1: the mechanics of Space Hulk that cats this feeling of
Speaker 1: of you know, it's like it's like it's so grim dark.
Speaker 1: It's the most grim dark game because it's like I
Speaker 1: am up against death. I am up against this thing
Speaker 1: that is ever patient and ever lasting, and it's probably
Speaker 1: in the game. I mean, it's probably going to kill you.
Speaker 1: It's a very dangerous game to play. Um and part
Speaker 1: of the fun is not in oh did I win?
Speaker 1: But did I almost win? Now? If I understand the
Speaker 1: Warhammer universe correctly, it would also be the implication that
Speaker 1: the humans are not really good, right, No, no, the
Speaker 1: humans are awful, but but they're the best choice compared
Speaker 1: to all of the other awful things in the universe,
Speaker 1: which does feel kind of like appropriately, like like ancient
Speaker 1: that it could have the mechanics like this could have
Speaker 1: found their their way and say a Babylonian uh mindset
Speaker 1: that all right, let's take one or break and we
Speaker 1: come back. Uh, we're gonna just roll through a few
Speaker 1: more examples of ancient board games and board games of note,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to close out. Alright, we're back now.
Speaker 1: One of the ancient games that seemed kind of interesting
Speaker 1: to me is a game of if I understand correctly,
Speaker 1: it's basically of unknown mechanics known as Lubo, which is
Speaker 1: an ancient Chinese board game. Right, the name means six sticks.
Speaker 1: It's the game of six sticks. Uh, Lubou sounds a
Speaker 1: lot better, rolls off the top a lot, a lot easier. Uh.
Speaker 1: So the rules of this game, yeah, are still uncertain,
Speaker 1: but we see figurines of men playing it from Han
Speaker 1: dynasty tombs that would have been the area of two
Speaker 1: to b C two two twenty c E. And it
Speaker 1: was likely invented in the first millennium b C. But
Speaker 1: the height of its popularity was definitely the Han dynasty.
Speaker 1: So there would have been two players. There was a
Speaker 1: board and sticks were thrown to determine the movement of pieces.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons we don't know a lot
Speaker 1: about this game is this game died out because there
Speaker 1: was an invasive there was another game. There was a competitor.
Speaker 1: The game of Go entered the picture in the Joe
Speaker 1: Dynasty around somewhere in the region of ten forty six
Speaker 1: through two e and eventually just overtook Lubou to become
Speaker 1: the most important board game in Chinese culture, and it
Speaker 1: remains so to this day. Now, we didn't uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about casting the sticks here. One thing we
Speaker 1: didn't even really get into this, into it all in
Speaker 1: this was the long dice. You see these referenced in
Speaker 1: um in some of the Hindu epics. To kind about
Speaker 1: casting the long dice in battle, you know, whether just
Speaker 1: there were a type of dice that were there were
Speaker 1: long and more stick like, but they were used as
Speaker 1: a as as a form of of generating a random figure. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of India, we do have to at least touch
Speaker 1: on chess really quickly. Again, Chess a much later game
Speaker 1: than anything else we've discussed here. First millennium CE came
Speaker 1: out of India and it still commands a global following today.
Speaker 1: And it's even though it's not as as ancient as
Speaker 1: these other games, it's still pretty old. And it's really
Speaker 1: impressive that chess remains such a standard of strategic board games,
Speaker 1: you know, like it is. I mean, it is kind
Speaker 1: of the gold standard. I mean, I think it's one
Speaker 1: of those games that doesn't really need much fluff because
Speaker 1: it's mechanics are so solid that it is, uh, there
Speaker 1: is such a thing. I mean, I think again we
Speaker 1: should acknowledge we've sort of been hinting at this that
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear that some games are just inherently better
Speaker 1: than others mechanically. I mean, there's this such a thing
Speaker 1: as a much more balanced game that's uh, that does
Speaker 1: better at allowing different types of strategy and thus makes
Speaker 1: it more interesting because they are more different ways you
Speaker 1: can achieve a win. There are other games that are
Speaker 1: that are I think just sort of easier to hack.
Speaker 1: I think that's the thing that that makes for a
Speaker 1: bad game. A game that's easy to hack, can you
Speaker 1: break the game, or a game that requires no skill
Speaker 1: at all, of course, but among games that require a skill,
Speaker 1: if there's a way to hack it so that if
Speaker 1: you just know a certain strategy you can pretty much
Speaker 1: always win, that game becomes less interesting. Tick Tack Toe
Speaker 1: is a good example of that. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: know how to play, and you go first, you can
Speaker 1: always either win or be forced to a draw, right.
Speaker 1: I think another similar example is Apples to Apples, which
Speaker 1: can be a fun game. I'm not anti Apples to Apples,
Speaker 1: but if one person does not want to play, if
Speaker 1: one person wants to break the game, they will break it.
Speaker 1: That's breaking in the opposite way. Yeah, breaking by like
Speaker 1: not uh having a strategy that just always wins, but
Speaker 1: breaking by ruining it for everybody. Right though, most games
Speaker 1: that involve most games that involve any kind of like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, intelligent input or verbal input by the player,
Speaker 1: I feel it can be like that. It seems to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't have as much experience with D
Speaker 1: and D as you do, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons is clearly a game where one bad
Speaker 1: player can completely ruin the game. Well yeah, there's such
Speaker 1: a social context with Dungeons and Dragons. Um. I was
Speaker 1: talking to this with with one of the gamers I
Speaker 1: played with recently about the idea of competitive Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons and how there there have been some efforts to
Speaker 1: create sort of the I wouldn't necessarily say a limited
Speaker 1: rule set, but certainly a system in which you could
Speaker 1: have competitive game playing between characters, and then you can
Speaker 1: also I guess there are some of the older like
Speaker 1: really fierce dungeons that can be used as a competitive environment.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, you're not going to see
Speaker 1: games of Dungeons and dragons on say ESPN six or whatever.
Speaker 1: But you will see games of Magic the Gathering on
Speaker 1: there because Magic the Gathering is is more of a
Speaker 1: traditional game. It is a traditional card game that has
Speaker 1: hard fast rules and uh and does not have this
Speaker 1: social role playing element to it. Another example, and this
Speaker 1: is one we have a whole episode of stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind about, but Werewolf is a high social game.
Speaker 1: And certainly if if you if you were playing Werewolf
Speaker 1: with people that were not on board with it. Uh
Speaker 1: and I don't even like to imagine people of that caliber,
Speaker 1: but if they were trying to play a game with
Speaker 1: people who are not into it, um, you know it
Speaker 1: would it would wreck the game. You just wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to play Werewolf. Absolutely, one obnoxious player will ruin
Speaker 1: the experience. Now I mentioned earlier, you know what happens
Speaker 1: when an invasive games game comes in and it's better
Speaker 1: than what you have. One example of that is the
Speaker 1: Viking game tablet uh. This is one of the Norse
Speaker 1: taffle games from the fourth through twelve centuries, probably based
Speaker 1: on the earlier Roman game Lutus latron cooler ruma, and
Speaker 1: it was replaced by chess in the twelfth century. So
Speaker 1: basically they found chess and they're like, whoa, this is
Speaker 1: way better than this thing. Let's just switch to chess,
Speaker 1: and they did. Now that makes it interesting also because
Speaker 1: that suggests that certain games occupy certain almost like ecological
Speaker 1: niches within culture if they can be placed like that,
Speaker 1: because one game obviously does not displace all other games.
Speaker 1: You know, a new game doesn't come in and say,
Speaker 1: now this is the only game people play and all
Speaker 1: other games are gone. It can it can beat out
Speaker 1: certain games, and it's it makes it suggest that, like
Speaker 1: there's an ecosystem of play and that certain games feel
Speaker 1: so certain roles within that and that if another game
Speaker 1: comes in and feels that particular role better than that
Speaker 1: game will win out. But you you wouldn't see chess
Speaker 1: replacing foot racing, you know. Yeah, yeah, there's a certain
Speaker 1: place in your culture, in your life, maybe even daily
Speaker 1: or weekly life, that this game can occupy. And if
Speaker 1: something fits that fits that that role better, then yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to take over. It also suggests that there
Speaker 1: are different kinds of fun, and that certain games elicit
Speaker 1: one particular type of fun but not another one, so
Speaker 1: they'll be in competition for that limited fun resource that
Speaker 1: people have to give. As one consequence of thing like this,
Speaker 1: I've sometimes wondered, like, Okay, how much overlap is there
Speaker 1: between the demand for board games and the demand for
Speaker 1: video games. Will video games ever completely replace board games?
Speaker 1: What's it's been interesting to to sort of watch this
Speaker 1: play out right, because today we have so many amazing
Speaker 1: video games. Uh, there's just you know there the graphics,
Speaker 1: the complexity, the different types of video games. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, look at the board game renaissance that
Speaker 1: we're living in, where there's living in a golden age
Speaker 1: of you can go out and you can find so
Speaker 1: many different types of competitive game, strategic games, cooperative games,
Speaker 1: games that mix competition and cooperation, games with a million
Speaker 1: different varieties of fluff to them, games for for old
Speaker 1: people with young people, different levels of rural complexity. Games
Speaker 1: and you know that certainly have some basis in video
Speaker 1: game design, Like there's certain communication between the two worlds
Speaker 1: for sure, but there's there's just there's just so much
Speaker 1: out there. Like clearly, board games for ill something in
Speaker 1: our lives that a video game cannot quite handle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one clear example is that board games have some kind
Speaker 1: of social element that's um, I don't want to say
Speaker 1: more mainstream, because that's not necessarily it, but the social
Speaker 1: element that's more acceptable among certain kinds of social uh
Speaker 1: settings than video games do. Like I can see there
Speaker 1: are people who would be into going over to a
Speaker 1: friend's house for a board game night, but who would
Speaker 1: not be going into going over to a friend's house
Speaker 1: for a video game night. Well, right, I remember going
Speaker 1: over to like people's places and they're playing rock Band,
Speaker 1: and that's a that's a game where you work together,
Speaker 1: you play it together with other people. But everybody where's
Speaker 1: everybody looking, they're looking at the screen. It's just it
Speaker 1: was kind of a sad site. But you go over
Speaker 1: and you play a board game together, uh, and you're
Speaker 1: you're facing each other, you end up hating each other
Speaker 1: depending on the game, right, But but then you have
Speaker 1: this interface between you. It's this this thing that's bringing
Speaker 1: it together. And so only video games can be very
Speaker 1: social there are some wonderful online communities built up around these,
Speaker 1: but the board game is ah it facilitates a more
Speaker 1: of a physical in person connection. You know. It is
Speaker 1: people who would otherwise not gather around a table uh
Speaker 1: and have anything to talk about, can gather around the
Speaker 1: right game and and they're good to go. After all
Speaker 1: this discussion, I'm kind of interested in coming back to
Speaker 1: the question we started with. I don't know if we've
Speaker 1: answered this, but to think a little bit more about,
Speaker 1: now that we looked at these games, what is the
Speaker 1: what is the role these games are playing in the
Speaker 1: biological impulse toward play? Again, we know that we haven't
Speaker 1: fully answered the question of why play exists among animals
Speaker 1: like us, But they're all these theories that maybe it
Speaker 1: signals reproductive fitness, that maybe it helps teach us skills
Speaker 1: we need later in life. Maybe it helps and makes
Speaker 1: us make us more versatile, you know, things like that.
Speaker 1: Where do board games fit into these theories, if, if anywhere? Indeed,
Speaker 1: I hope this is there's a question that people will
Speaker 1: take with them as they go on to inevitably play
Speaker 1: board games with their friends, with family, with co workers,
Speaker 1: with strangers. However, you want to do it. Um. And
Speaker 1: certainly if you weren't planning to play a board game,
Speaker 1: maybe consider picking one up or pulling one out of
Speaker 1: the closet. As we get to close out here, UH,
Speaker 1: we always want to thank Scott Benjamin for helping us
Speaker 1: out with research on these episodes. Scott brought a number
Speaker 1: of cool board game facts and uh and lists to
Speaker 1: our to our attention, including a couple of world records
Speaker 1: that are interesting to look at in light of everything
Speaker 1: we've discussed. So one of them is the largest collection
Speaker 1: of board games as of two thousand and eleven, according
Speaker 1: to the Guinness Book of World Records. It was one
Speaker 1: Uh Jeff Bossby's in the United States with one thousand
Speaker 1: and thirty one different board games. You know that's too
Speaker 1: many board games? Sorry, I don't know. I don't want
Speaker 1: to be judgmental, but like, can you really play all those?
Speaker 1: And it sounds doable, it's not improbable. Um. And then
Speaker 1: the longest marathon playing a board game. Uh. This was
Speaker 1: from two thousand, seventeen eighty hours, achieved by four participants
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands. Uh. And this was from January three
Speaker 1: through the sixth seventeen. They played a total of four
Speaker 1: hundred games of Gunzen Board Game of the Goose during
Speaker 1: the eighty hour marathon. That sounds like too many games
Speaker 1: of Gonsen board. Yeah, I mean you could have fit
Speaker 1: like three games of Arkham Harror instead. So I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm getting old finger wagon. Um. I love Go Home Guys,
Speaker 1: I kid Arkham her, I love Arkham Hart, but I've
Speaker 1: also never completed a game of Arkham harr Um. So anyway,
Speaker 1: just a couple of Guinness World records to help close
Speaker 1: out these two episodes on games, I just had one
Speaker 1: more thought about thinking about the role of board games
Speaker 1: among the biological category of play, and maybe a way
Speaker 1: of approaching the question of what role they serve or
Speaker 1: what they What the real essence is is to think
Speaker 1: about what makes a board game not fun? Like that
Speaker 1: that might help us come in on it. So one
Speaker 1: thing that's definitely not fun is when board games are
Speaker 1: too easy to win, right when or when there's no
Speaker 1: skill involved, Like I mean, I guess little kids enjoy
Speaker 1: playing candy Land, but just general like roll the dice
Speaker 1: and move your pieces and have no skill involved, that's
Speaker 1: not fun, not for not for growing and advanced players. Um. Likewise,
Speaker 1: I one frustration I've had with certain games, and I
Speaker 1: won't name them, is when I've played a game where
Speaker 1: there were too many ways to win, like it was there.
Speaker 1: I like having a certain amount of complexity, like it's
Speaker 1: neat when you have like a doom counter and you
Speaker 1: know there are several different things going on at once.
Speaker 1: But there was at least one game I've played and
Speaker 1: I just it was like there were five different ways
Speaker 1: to win it, and I wasn't sure what I was
Speaker 1: supposed to be doing, like how I was supposed to uh,
Speaker 1: employee strategy. I just felt kind of lost in this system,
Speaker 1: and I felt like it needed to be It needed
Speaker 1: to be somewhat simplified, at least for a first play.
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you mean. At a game night
Speaker 1: here in the office, I once what We played a
Speaker 1: game that was some kind of like zombie outbreak setting
Speaker 1: type game. I've never heard of it before, but it
Speaker 1: had so many rules. The rule book was like a novel,
Speaker 1: and there were just so many different things you could
Speaker 1: do or had to do each turn. And we played
Speaker 1: this game for like multiple hours and still and we
Speaker 1: had never figured out how to play by the end.
Speaker 1: By the time we stopped um, and that is frustrating.
Speaker 1: That's like, that's not fun. Maybe some people have fun
Speaker 1: doing that, but I don't, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of players don't. So there's also a part of us
Speaker 1: that desires a game to be concise. Like there's a
Speaker 1: certain kind of elegance in games that have a small
Speaker 1: list of rules from which great complexity of game and
Speaker 1: play emerges. Right. I also like it when a game
Speaker 1: organically gradually increases the complexity. So there's a there's a
Speaker 1: game I really like called Fabled Fruit, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's basically a card game, very kid friendly, and the
Speaker 1: cards change as you progress. So when they start off,
Speaker 1: it's very simple. You're trying to collect different fruits to
Speaker 1: make different essentially smoothies, and each smoothie as a point.
Speaker 1: But you you you quickly move through the initial cards
Speaker 1: and you get in in. The more you play the game,
Speaker 1: the more complex the mechanics of the cards becomes. But
Speaker 1: but you're gonna work up to that, Like, you just
Speaker 1: work up to that point by virtue of playing the game.
Speaker 1: And I think that's just a rather clever mechanic. Even
Speaker 1: if you may never even get to the later cards.
Speaker 1: You know, I certainly haven't playing it with my son,
Speaker 1: but he loves playing it at the level we're at,
Speaker 1: and it's comforting knowing that we could keep playing it
Speaker 1: and it would just get more complicated, but he would
Speaker 1: be able to roll with it via the experience of
Speaker 1: playing with it at lower levels. I love that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the games with a what what what do you call
Speaker 1: a slow learning curve or whatever? The games that are
Speaker 1: easy to pick up and difficult to master. That seems
Speaker 1: like the sweet spot of what a game should be.
Speaker 1: If it's really great like that, you know that there
Speaker 1: is a lot of skill and strategy involved if you
Speaker 1: know what you're doing, But also it's not impossible to
Speaker 1: just get going and understand how the game works. All right,
Speaker 1: when we're gonna close it off there. But obviously you've
Speaker 1: all played board games or and or card games and
Speaker 1: various other games that fall under this loose category, and
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from you about them. What
Speaker 1: are your favorites, what are your least favorites? Uh? Hey,
Speaker 1: have any of you played some variation on the ancient
Speaker 1: games that we've discussed here. The proposed rule systems are
Speaker 1: out there. You can find proposed rules for er UH
Speaker 1: and Senate online. So if you've done that, let us
Speaker 1: know what you thought of them. What was it like
Speaker 1: to to sit down and play some variation of this
Speaker 1: this ancient leisure activity. Did it make you feel like
Speaker 1: a pharaoh? Maybe? So? As always, you can find the
Speaker 1: other episodes of Invention at at invention pod dot com.
Speaker 1: UH you'll find links to our social media accounts there.
Speaker 1: If you want to discuss the show and discuss your
Speaker 1: favorite board games and on Facebook, head on over to
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module. That's where
Speaker 1: listeners discuss our other shows Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: but also episodes of Invention. It's a good place to
Speaker 1: interact with other listeners and also with two of us.
Speaker 1: Thanks to our friends Scott Benjamin for research assistance on
Speaker 1: this episode and to our excellent audio producer Tory Harrison.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode, during the other to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.