Neolithic digs have already yielded fifty-one game boards
Board games move pieces on patterned boards, sometimes with dice. Cultures worldwide invented and traded them. As of 2024, archaeologists report fifty-one boards from fourteen Neolithic sites spanning the early seventh to mid-sixth millennium BC—deep roots for tabletop play.
The phrase board game itself first appears in English between the 1840s and 1850s. Among the oldest candidates, Senet from Egypt has possible board fragments from about 3100 BC and clear pictures from the early Third Dynasty era, yet it faded after AD 400 and its rules were never written down. Mehen, also Egyptian, dates with reasonable confidence to between 3000 and 2300 BC, with equally unknown rules. Sculpted stones in sets of four from southwest Turkey, carved around 3000 BC, may have served a chess-like game.
Mesopotamia's Royal Game of Ur, found in royal tombs and dated to around 2500 BC, is often called the oldest playable game because a Babylonian astronomer recorded its rules on a cuneiform tablet about 177 BC. A similar set of 27 pieces and four dice, excavated in 1977 at Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran and dated 2600 to 2400 BC, makes a rival claim. Mancala's age is hard to pin down, with estimates ranging from Roman settlements back to divots carved in Jordan perhaps 7000 years BC. In Europe, Homer's Iliad mentions the Greek game petteia, forerunner of Roman ludus latrunculorum, and in Mesoamerica Toltecs and Aztecs played patolli.
Mass production launched a Golden Age from the 1880s to the 1920s, a label coined by historian Margaret Hofer, and Monopoly, released in 1935, had been played 500 million times by 1999. The Settlers of Catan in 1995 carried German-style design beyond Europe, and Carcassonne in 2000 and Ticket to Ride in 2004 helped drive a so-called Board Game Renaissance; one 2014 estimate put annual market growth at 25 to 40 percent since 2010.
Games sit on a spectrum from pure skill, like chess, to pure chance, like Candy Land, with backgammon and Risk in between. Dice go back to Ur, while Sorry! uses cards and Scrabble random letter tiles. Stratego hides information, Diplomacy rewards negotiation, and sites like Board Game Arena now host play online.
Source: Board game
