Game of the Goose

What seemed like a pretty simple kids game from the 1600s to 1800s turned out to go so far down the rabbit hole, I can't even think where to begin.  The Game of the Goose was a simple roll-and-move game, generally a spiral with 63 spaces, ending in the middle.  If you land on a space with a goose, you roll again (or leap forward to the next goose), but there are other spaces along the way that send you forward or back, or swap spaces with other players, or sometimes pay a chip penalty, or simply die ... it's sounds like just another race game, right?  But you have to read the rules on each board very carefully; some are steeped in symbolism or strange morality plays, where the same layout is popularly used for tourism of countries or cities full of fine renditions of places to see.

A lovely introduction can be found at tradgames.co.uk.

You can search almost any major museum site, the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the British Museum, and all of them will have a cache of these games to look at.  Hundreds of images are just a click away.  Kids are still drawing these games boards as class projects at school.  Sites for teachers resources have them ready to print and play.

Here is British Museum 1893,0331.54, 18th century:

But the full power of the internet in the hands of avid collectors and researchers can be found on the vast site Game of the Goose by Luigi Ciompi & Adrian Seville.  There are thousands of images, editions, and reviews here, with relics going back to about 1500.  Gorgeous art from all periods, some in striking full color, others in supremely detailed black & white or greyscale.

A major version in America circa 1800 was "The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement": it has the same spiral, chock full of Christian virtues and vices.  Were kids really supposed to have fun moving along a board full of preachy blurbs?  Does anyone think that young players were actually going to learn morals from these games?  I have a hard time picturing who the intended audience was for these. 

My question is, what is going on here?  I would expect that more complex games would be the ones with more complex history, but these date from ages where maybe there was no such thing as a generic board game for kids.  Were there times and places where fun was not allowed, and every activity had to be a lesson?

On the fun side, the spiral motif goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, with the game of Mehen and others.  Queue the AncientGames site here.  It's hard to say that these games are truly connected across such vast spans of time.  After all, any bored kid might draw a spiral and start moving some pieces around; there are only so many patterns that an abstract race track might take.

My favorite little link in this cycle is the possibility that the mysterious and untranslated Phaistos Disk (16th to 14thc BC) might actually have been a game board.  I remember that artifact from my days as a linguistics student -- it was fascinating that there were still things that looked like writing that we could not read.  But you need enough symbols and enough examples to work out the system being used.  Picture the thousands of hours that have been spent studying it, trying to get language cues from those 45 different characters ... what if it was just a bunch of geese and funny pictures, and landing on space number 27 sent you back to the start?

The history of games is full of twists and turns, and yes, spirals with geese just waiting to be traveled.