The first thing to know about me is that I’m not a historian or anthropologist.
Games are my passion.
“Playing a game with company used to be the norm.
I started young. Whenever my family visited their friends with kids, we’d play a game of Sorry, Monopoly, The Game of Life, and the like. This was during a time when video games were so new that most households didn’t have a console.
Playing a game with company used to be the norm. You’d invite some friends over for a visit. The parents would chat, maybe play cards or dominoes, and the kids would play a colorful board game, if they weren’t sent outside until it got dark.
At home, my mother was fully into the backgammon craze of the 70s, so as soon as I was old enough to understand the rules, she passed that passion on to me.
Later in life, of course, I got into video games, but I never lost my love for board and card games of all types. Inevitably, I started collecting niche hobby games in the early 90s, when some of the modern designs from Europe, such as Settlers of Catan, made their way to the US.
Because I loved learning new games and teaching anyone who would play with me, I developed a reputation as an expert. One day, I visited a state park, and while we were talking to the park interpreter, my love of games came up in conversation (it frequently does). She asked me if there were any games themed around El Camino Real that she could introduce at an upcoming cultural festival.
Well, I couldn’t think of any modern games with that theme, but I replied that with a little research, I could find out some games that were known at the time that colonists might have played. I volunteered to put together some mock-up boards and teach the games to park visitors. It turned out to be a big hit
That led me down a historic game rabbit hole, and I started collecting traditional games and game systems from around the world.
(my knee pointing at two games on the floor)
As I got into the research, I noticed that many historical sources were compiled by Europeans in the 1800s or earlier. This meant I was reading around some jingoistic language, which can make them unpleasant to read. In addition, one must remember that parlor games were far more common in these times, so the person describing the rules often assumed the reader already knew of certain conventions of play, so they didn’t need to describe them.
Like folk stories, many of these games were passed along by word of mouth, or used house rules, leading to many variants and some rules simply being lost to time. This is where historians and anthropologists might have difficulty. They may know more about the cultural context, but they don’t necessarily live and breathe games. A gamer with a broad foundation of different mechanics might recognize something in a ruleset that survived to the modern day to be used in other games. This can make it a little easier to fill in the blanks. It may or may not be historically accurate, but a little bit of interpretation by a game designer can make a “lost” game playable.
My goal is to demystify some of the lesser-known games from history, write them up with detailed illustrations and clear examples, in the hopes that anyone with an interest can keep some of the past alive, through play.