ScottVee Gaming

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, we ran through a game of Senet.  It feels like a precursor to backgammon.  Can't escape that.  I realize that these are artist rendering of actual relics, but I would have put some tiny arrows at the top right side and middle left to show how the spaces flow around the edges. The base rules say to start with the pieces on the board in an alternating pattern, but that does give a tiny advantage to one player.  The main variation says to roll to get your pieces onto the board -- maybe we will try that next time.  Instead of capturing a piece or sending it back to start by landing on it, you swap that piece with your piece.  So if you landed on a piece with a four, you move your piece ahed 4 and send that piece back 4.  We called that "being bumped".  To me, the most interesting piece of strategy was that putting two of your pieces in a row makes them immune from being bumped, and three in a row is a b...

I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...

This was the first game by Milton Bradley , who was real person with quite a story.  It dates all the way back to 1860, and here is an excellent article on the early days of his game company.  It is played on a basic checker board with each square showing different virtues, faults, points, or arrows to other squares.  Here is my version of the board, with one difference from the one shown in the article.  We'll get back to that in a bit. There were similar games at the time, and they were played by starting in the bottom left corner and moving as in Snakes & Ladders: bottom row left to right, then up one, next row right to left then up one, next row back the other way.  When writing is done in this way the pattern is called boustrophedon, which is one of my all-time favorite nerdy words. But there was an extra piece to this game which shows the actual movement scheme of the game. Each player would get one of these cards with the scoring dial and move chart....

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 thes...

Patolli is a cross-shaped game of the "race around the board" variety, from Central America, possibly as far back as 200 BC.  It is also the center of a century-long dispute about whether a game from the new world, which is very very similar to Parchisi (from India) could have been independently invented, or obviously borrowed.  In this case, the trouble is that the early reports are from the early 1600s, from Spanish conquerors who were not necessarily reliable observers.  There are really only three possible answers: - Yes, the New World game was borrowed from some Old World source, but rather than proving some highly unlikely link between cultures, maybe a single missionary brought it over and it caught on much later than the stories would have us believe. - No, there was no borrowing, it was a purely local invention.  Sure, both games toss 4 or 5 binary objects (beans for Patolli and cowrie shells for Parchisi).  Yes, both boards are cross-shaped, but it's n...

Another ancient board game, Puluc (also known as Bul or Boolik) is from Mesoamerica.  There are interesting debates about its exact origin, and whether or not it predates the Spanish conquest of the region.  It is a simple game, just a track with nine spaces, but it is a relaxing little challenge that does get tactical at times. The best sources for information are the usual suspects: BoardGameGeek , Cyningstan, a4games and an overview from Wikipedia . The basic board looks like this (my quick version): But, in keeping with the endless creativity of game board makers, there are versions with 10 spaces, up to 25 have been reported, and the Wikipedia image shows a board designed in a circular pattern. The basic rules are: 1. Setup 5 red pieces in the red zone ("city"), and 5 blue pieces in the blue zone. 2. Each turn, throw the 4 two-sided casting sticks to see how many spaces you can move.  If no sticks land face-up, that counts as 5 spaces. 3. move any one piece the num...

Sometimes, the super simple kids games are the most fun. Maybe they are not worth analyzing, maybe they are. But here we go. Sorry! is an odd game. At first look, there is nothing to it. And yeah, behind the scenes there is nothing to it either. But when I sat down to play a session just now, to get some images for this little set of articles, THIS happened: It's like the game knew I was going to write about it, so it handed me a big negative 4. "Here, you can start off by NOT going anywhere."    On the funny side, after Anne and I picked up this copy of Sorry! about a year ago, for the first few months we didn't notice that the 4 actually says move Back 4. Not Ahead 4. Umm, shouldn't the four be a different color to maybe make it stand out from the forward-moving crowd?  Okay, negative four did make the game slightly more variable. And at a dinner a few months later, Doug let us know that the slides let you knock out ALL the players along the slide - eve...