8000 Years of Board Game History in 43 Minutes - SHUX Presents

thank you very much waiting and first who here likes history and who's ready to go whiplash still some of you I only asked because in this talk I'm going to be launching you who I consider my eager test pilots through seven thousand eight hundred and fifty years of board-gaming history in a little over sixty minutes taking us from the earliest known prehistoric board games of six thousand BC right up through to the invention of your and my humble servant cardboards along the way there's going to be blood there's going to be sex and there will be jokes but first there's gonna be a disclaimer which is that I am NOT a historian I have no background in academic history I am a fan of history that means that I wrote this for fun and I will get things wrong if during this talk I pronounce any names correctly I assure you it is an accident if someone next to you at some point starts bleeding from their ears it's probably because they are a historian and I've made yet another assumption at the end of this talk I'm gonna be named checking the people who really deserve the credit which is the authors of the books that I used during the researching of this talk so you can go and do some further reading if you two are hooked on this dusty drug that I call the past and with that we are ready to begin I'm gonna need all of you to make some kind of wibbly time-travel noise as we travel to the very start of our story [Music] so I want you to imagine right now that you are 8,000 years old which I don't think is a big ask considering that's how old I feel after every shocks I want you to imagine you're living in one of the prehistoric settlements so beautifully depicted in this google image search 3d render let me help you out a bit here though so 6,000 BC is before pottery it is before some smart aleck invented the wheel it is in fact before the extinction of the saber-tooth Tiger okay though they probably don't live near you let's see if I can go back in slides so what prehistory means really it is a fancy word for saying it's before humans wrote anything down but in the in this hardscrabble existence that you are living in where you are you know you have really frankly probably not much food imagine that you are by the fire pit and you're skinning an animal or just thinking about how much your life sucks but opposite you in the semi-darkness not a saber-toothed tiger your sister or someone might be carving something that looks like this okay this is a Mancala board and we find them in some of the earliest human settlements across the Middle East in fact now this is the earliest known kind of board game but really it's a genre of board games what Mancala is is a series of games which have divots in the ground or an ax board perhaps carved from woods and you can put seeds or shells in the holes and then move them perhaps picking up four seeds in one hole of your color and moving them dropping them along the way kind of like an early version of backgammon now I want you to dwell on this for a second the instant that humans became advanced enough that we were able to strip just a tiny bit of free time from each punishing day we started making games of chance and skill and as we'll see in a few short years board games that tell stories now we don't know the role that a community's Mancala set have had in ancient humans but what we can do is we can treat ourselves to the supposition that Mancala was perhaps a little bit magical and there's a few different reasons for that but if you look at Mancala as it's played in African societies today which are of course is significantly did you know to understand it a significantly more advanced people there are still superstitions so in the Ugandan game of Amway so the witch was a substantially complicated kind of man kala um the game was used to determine how good of a king you'd be I was sorry this is just about a hundred years ago in much the same way the chess in Western societies we like to think that's a that determines how good of a general you are but in the West African people of Yoruba this is even today it's considered unlucky to play their mank at one of their games of mine color at night because spirits will want to join in also the Yoruba people will have seven different several different kinds of Mancala board in their village but if someone dies it's considered unlucky to play Mancala on that person's favorite board because their spirit might want to join in so really it's impossible to imagine today the totemic significance that Mancala would have had not just when this was a game in your village but when this was games and this is what delights me about ancient board games the way that it's hard to see whether game ends and culture begins and where culture ends and magic begins if you've ever felt that board games have kind of a mad magic magnetic pole which is pretty where a lot of you are here I'm here to tell you that yeah there is a lot of magic in this hobby so what you're looking at here is something very exciting even it sounds like the name of wizard astragalus okay these are knuckle bones of different animals and we find them throughout what's called the cradle of civilization where the first human cities started showing up around 5000 BC and what astragalus is there a form of divination okay now ancient humans well it's unfair to say that ancient humans loved divination because we still love divination today as you know the undying popularity of horoscopes and fortune cookies show and different human societies have different kinds of divination here in America and also in Korea hunters would throw handfuls of arrows in the air and then how they fall determined the answer to your question in some excellent Asian cultures there's something called kiya da Mansi which is cracking open a coconut and reading the inside but astragalus is what we find in the Middle East and the way that these knuckle bones work is you throw them in the air and then how they fall beside they fall on or perhaps you could mark something in the ground and let them fall like like you would almost a Ouija board gives you your answer should we hunt north or south today and you throw them and they fall but so what astragalus have found as tools of the of the Sumerian priests class which was an area of Mesopotamia they are way too common to just be tools of priests and in fact we know that they were used for games as well and if we know this because astragalus have been found with astronauts have been found with colored pebbles so imagine that you've got your astragalus and then you've got some pebbles with them as an extra board game component to play more complicated games and in fact we still play some of the astragalus games today if you know jacks that game of bouncing a rubber ball and then picking up jacks that's the game of astragalus it survived for 6,000 years history's awesome I'm going to try not to embarrass myself by getting too excited but also sometimes you would just throw them in the side they would fall on was the game but what a board gamers do we like to pimp out our games a little bit especially if you don't have many of them so people would start marking the sides of astragalus with with what they represented so you didn't have to remember it kind of like we didn't annotate a card with the rule and then what's not filing down the edges and then just in a few short thousand years they start to look like this this is the story of the invention of dice I think some of you probably saw that coming but I was trying to hide it because I think it is awesome but let me be clear here it's not that knucklebones were tools of communicating with the gods that over hundreds or thousands of years became simple tools to generate random numbers rather humans have been rolling bones since there were bones because for us as an animal that thrives on pattern recognition to toss an object or turn a card and get an unexpected result is magical I'm gonna skip forward in our timeline a little bit to 200 BC to talk about the Romans for just a moment because even when you've got a civilization so advanced I mean the Romans in but we're inventing sewers concrete even newspapers but the Romans loved dice games and they talked a lot about how the result that a dice gets is the will of the gods they banged on about this all the time but one of the things that historians still discuss if you look at these dice you can see that they're not cubes some of them are just way more likely to roll some results than others and we do not know whether the Romans would who were sometimes by the way buried with these dice ancient peoples were buried with their knuckle bones which should be familiar to any of you who when playing card games don't like people to touch your deck or your dice but we don't know like let's say you're the Roman who has those dice in the corner which are just the worst if they're less likely to roll that five on the bottom we don't know if that Roman was like it's just the will of the gods that a dozen roll fives because they thought that if you roll the dice it came up with whatever the gods thought oh is that us modern people looking back on the Romans and going are they were crazy religious did the Romans use it as a figure of speech as well I don't know but what I will tell you is we've barely moved on from this Etsy has a roaring trade in dice prisons do you see what I'm saying um so like I went to school with somebody no sorry I tell a lie friend of a friend who played Warhammer and when one of his dice misbehaved he would put it in a microwave and make the other dice watch okay so again you see what I'm saying I'm talking about how magic was in the earliest board games and magic never left okay so let's talk about Senate some people who are wrong say this is the earliest board game but it's where we've arrived this is about 3000 BC the thing about Senate this is an ancient Egyptian game it's the earliest board game that we know how to play because blessed the Egyptians they wrote stuff down in the form of hieroglyphs and there's this great story that because the Senate boards are found almost perfectly preserved in tombs and these Egyptologists go into a tomb and there's some hieroglyphs and it's talking about passing and how if a person passes someone else then and Egyptologist didn't understand what it meant until one of them was probably a gamer said hang on this is a manual and we looked at the we we looked at we like to sentiment oh my god it's the rules for Senate so what we got here is a race game it's a two-player race game Egyptians would roll handfuls of sticks that would black on one side or dark on one side and light on the other and that was a 1 or 0 and you roll a handful to get a bunch of numbers which by the way is a lovely way to roll dice like we use dice a lot with that stick thing if you throw a handful of sticks it just feels great it's just difficult to pick them up I'm getting distracted so now it's a game when you roll I brought your sticks and then you move pieces a number of spaces trying to sort of carry them all off and now but we didn't just have written down the rule of the manual by the way the thing is we like to think of hieroglyphs is very fancy but they wrote our comic strips as well and this is a super seedy egyptian comic strip that was written down by a laborer with some hieroglyphs that tells the story of a lion and a gazelle that plays senate and then the lion wins and as a result he's able to take the gazelle to beds which i think we can all agree is pretty hot but we have another thing a more serious thing which I'm going to talk about now so this was found on the wall of a tomb in Mayer this is a Egyptian queen this is huge by the way this is like a wall this picture and I'm gonna hold this for a second as I as I tell a different story there's an interesting thing about Senate okay so the history of board games is necessarily the history of these games traveling the world brought by invading armies priestly missionaries almost often mercantile traders um the story of chess which we'll see in a second is this grand transformative story of different cultures they take chess and they change it and then they get burn someone else takes it and changes it and it travels around the world card games when China invents playing cards in 1508 no I forget doesn't matter we're not gonna be telling our story but when China invents playing cards China and Japan weren't speaking like like two bickering sort of parents so playing cards went all the way to Europe and then European traders brought them all the way to Japan so they went around the world and back again Senate barely left Egypt and there's a few possibilities for this it made it as far as like Cyprus where they were I mean I'm exaggerating but the point is that Senate was played for three thousand years when Alexander the Great invaded Egypt people were still playing Santa at 3,000 years after it was created but it never left why well there's the possibility that I like which is that Senate was just a boring game so the yeah it was like kind of the earliest example of Monopoly perhaps where people played it but you know I don't know if you've no time to think of Monopoly as a global thing but they don't play it everywhere they I don't believe it's particularly popular in Asia so it's only a curse in some places and I like to imagine you know the Egyptian traders taking papyrus and flax and they're in the caravanserai and they're spending the night there's the Babylonians and then the Egyptians got the Babylonians say hey your place on it and the Babylonians are like oh my god no but the truth is probably a little different so when senate started those hieroglyphs that you see on the board went there at the beginning of Senate's lifespan they as we excavate later and later and later center boards we find the higher gifts and the higher gifts are religious hieroglyphs so what you jeep tour i've got his name what Egyptologist peter P&A has proposed is that senate was something like a playable guide to the afterlife and this is what queen nefertari here represents unusually for depictions of people playing senate she's playing a lung she's playing a solo game which is bizarre unless you acknowledge that senate had lessons to teach about Egyptian religion which is perhaps why level up she dips because it contained lessons that were only relevant to Egyptian beliefs and practices and once again I am dumbfounded as I always am when I read about podium history by modern board game design principles in this case fragments of theme and storytelling augmenting game mechanics having such appeal to humans that they're developed almost in parallel with the written word and books or to put it another way we're very proud now of how we add theme to board games there was a board game that told the story a thousand years before democracy existed so next I'm gonna talk about a game that did make it out of Egypt on the top of the sort of ancient world bgg hotness this is three men's Morris which you might know as tic-tac-toe or if you're from a civilized part of the world knots and crosses like that right that's what we call in England to clarify hmm but this at the earliest location we found of this that survives is it was carved into a roof tile I mean about 1400 BC presumably by a builder almost around the birth of our solo board game fan queen nefertari and this traveled all over the world as opposed to Senate this reached the Philippines the Romans were still playing it one and a half thousand years later the Romans took it to England and in this is heartbreaking right but who's who played tic-tac-toe as a kid and was like this is kind of a bad game yeah that's like all of you right so we're playing tic-tac-toe wrong so it's kind of the the version of of how people play Monopoly without the auction rule which actually makes it a game the way tic-tac-toe is supposed to work is players take turns putting three stones or I should use its ancient name three men's Morris three stones but once both players have put their three sons on the board rather than placing more you move them and you move them until someone wins so you don't get that stalemate but anyway what's exciting about three months Morris it is an ancient world example of something that we all know which is when you played board games you wanted to be bigger right let me introduce you to a game that also emerged after this six men's Morris or as I call it a tic-tac mofo so what we've got here it's a game when you place more stones and have to draw longer lines so it's a longer heavier game but what do you think everybody you think we can go bigger yeah say hello to nine men's Morris do you think we can go bigger 12 men's Morris you think we can go bigger we can't no yeah no this is the largest one that I was able to to find but this is this is tragic so the Romans as the Romans conquered the world in self-defense as historians like to say they can't of Morris boards wherever they went and I've actually seen this practice I've got some family friends in India and I went to this ancient fort and you can see board games carved into ancient structures and it's it's genuinely breathtaking to stand above a thousand-year-old carving and know that a thousand years ago a Spearman was stood bored out of his nut and he carved the board a fun thing about Romans is that they carved words as well when they carved boards really awesome latin phrases like Victor's la Barthe Lou Darrow nessus dilute re locum but it turns out that this was some of the earliest known instance of trash-talking those last two by the way were carved into a board that was outside a Tavern if that makes sense I've realized I forgot to tell a story about Senate Senate is actually the oldest example of trash-talking because if we skip all the way back to Senate Senate had a hieroglyph that we found of two people like a conversation between two Senate players Senate means passing in in whatever ancient Egyptian language they were writing down but passing so one players say are you bad at Senate and the reply is you speak as one week of tongue for passing is mine which i think is dope and I think all trash-talking should include the name of the game for example don't invade me or this will be the twilight of your Imperium I got loads of these you know what are you doing I'm the only Lord of Vegas hit etc I'm anyway the point is and this is depressing England was still playing three men's Morris a thousand years after the Romans left but I do love I hate medieval perspective it makes no sense and I think it's creepy but it's so amazing for depicting board games where everything has to be vertical okay where were we oh okay we're onto my favorite part we run to my favorite favorite favorite part so we're gonna skip from go to about zero BC now the Romans are paying three men's Morris I'm going to talk about the story of chess now and if you take nothing away this is just this is I I'm genuinely moved by how awesome this is so a chess if you didn't know originated in India and while this is a wooden board because it's a modern replication of an ancient Indian game called Ashta pada Indian board games don't survive because they made their games their boards on cloth which is actually coming back in board games now so yeah and also Egyptians had made when playing cards we teach at which India they make playing cards circular like in skull um India is like the the it does not get any credit for the moves I made anyway Ashley Potter is a race game kind of like all board games back then but it's played on a very familiar-looking 8x8 board so this was yup this was followed by a game called chaturanga this is just a nice picture I like of two Indian gods playing a board game as plank tabata you can see it's got the 8x8 board now chaturanga is what would become chess and oh my god researching this blew my mind because chess originated as something like chess combined with root the modern board game chess was originally a four player game in which everyone started with eight pieces and players would form alliances of like okay me and I think this play is like the best player would choose the second-best player or whatever you form an alliance you defeat the other two players around the boards and then at some point you have to turn on each other but of course that's a really interesting mechanic because when do you turn on someone because probably you have a backstabs first does this sound familiar everybody whoever back steps first is going to get an advantage the next step for chaturanga was to collapse people like the fourth player thing was kind of again kind of like route the four player thing was novel but it didn't hang together as well as just a straight to play game so they combined the forces so players it was two players and you'd start with sixteen pieces right but you can't meant there were two kings two kings so you had the Raja but then he got a minister we wouldn't get a king in a queen for about another thousand years but then I said I would hide her then then the game travelled along the Silk Road for how India traded with the rest of the world to Persia and Persians loved the game that gave the pieces fixed starting positions changed the Raja into a char naturally and created the terminology shot mat meaning literally the king is defeated which became the term checkmate a lot of board game history is Egyptians going I can't pronounce this i'ma make something else up yep the the war elephant became a chariot or rock which gives us the word rook but it doesn't explain why chest looks so weird so for that we're gonna talk about we're gonna went out to 600 AD and then comes the creation of a hot new religion called Islam Muslims invaded Persia Muslims loves chess but the Islamic caliphate was against the creation of images of humans and animals perhaps you can see where this is going so they said ok chess is great but rather than looking like little people maybe we can make them like abstract shapes of different heights with like weird circles and diamonds and stuff yeah so then oh yeah then chess has some like a mental breakdown chess then reaches Europe and for about 700 AD through the 12th century we get stuff we get a variety of chess variants that don't stick because people know that chess is cool but it's kind of boring so you get stuff like this which is which is created in what is now Germany but it's called Korea chess 13 squares wide then we get our awesome stuff so later in the 14th century the Persians who were still playing chess developed Tamburlaine chess also known as shuttle and Camilla or perfect chess which adds among other things a giraffe I'm getting some water I'm just gonna let you enjoy perfect chess for a second so in a really early example of theme helping you to remember rules I'm gonna tell you how the giraffe moves now and you're all gonna go oh my god I'm never gonna forget that the giraffe moves like a knight but rather than going up one along two it goes up one and along three and it's like yeah of course it does there's all menagerie of weird animals Tamlyn chess also has pawns which are like little versions of other pieces and they can all be it like you can see that there's like an elephant pawn so all of the pawns had the potential to become one of the other pieces if you get into the end but observing people among you will have noticed there's that weird little annex in the back this is awesome that in Tamil and chess is known as the Citadel and if you can get your King into the opponent's Citadel can like slam dunking a basketball the game is a draw because in Tamil a chess stalemate is a loss for both players which is interesting in terms of tournament scoring anyway then later in the 14th century oh no sorry 15th and 16th century in Europe you get a variety of powerful Queens who taken to the Thrones and I think Russia and Spain for the first time and with this idea that maybe the Queen's can be powerful someone had the good idea of what if there was a version of chess where the Queen could move as far as she wanted this variant became known as the mad Queen's game and it's what we play today so yeah we're playing mad Queens chess now this is my favorite part of my favorite part of the talk when chess made it to Japan it became known as shogi which is Japanese chess the main thing in shogi that differentiates it from chess is if you get a piece into the back third of the board it promotes so every piece has the potential to become a different piece if it reaches the back third so every piece kind of had two pieces pretty cool right but shogi provides us with an example of something that we now are know all too well because of Kickstarter which is the idea that board games can sometimes get too big we want them to get bigger we won out we won or twelve men's Morris but 15s men Morris doesn't hang around because it's too big this next line I'm going to show you um was only unveiled recently in the last few decades because it was lost to time but a few centuries ago there was the invention of ty ku ku shogi or ultimate chess a 36 by 36 board creates a total of 1296 spaces each player has 402 pieces that move in 253 different ways and of course it's shogi don't forget so they all have different pieces on the other sides magnificently taikyoku shogi has a Wikipedia page and you can read about all the different pieces and there's definitely a version of this talk where I do a poker app dip through all the pieces unfortunate I have no musical talent however I'm likely to do the talk again so if you do have a musical talent and wanted to write me a poker rap involving all those pieces I will perform it next time I did this talk okay so I'm just instead going to name some of my favorite pieces from taikyoku shogi so we have some classics like players have a knight and a king also unexpectedly modern shouting stuff like bear soldier and wrestler then there's far-out stuff players can each look forwards to marshaling an enchanted badger something called the cat sword and no less than 16 different types of dragon which when I was a kid reading the dungeons dungeons and dragons monster module we didn't have 16 times dragon when I was a child so now I'm because I've kind of in doing chess skipped over some really important seven board game history that I'm now going to gloss over really quickly because it had to be mentioned I'm gonna gloss over the invention of snakes and ladders in India in a time which hopefully I wrote down nope okay at some point which was created as a demonstration of the Hindu concepts of karma the reason there are more snakes than ladders ladders up wood shoots in the under Section I was brought it to show you that it was harder to be virtuous than it was to be evil and then of course snakes and ladders was bastardized by the Western but I mean we we took a lot of the religious magical champions at a lot of board games I believe also over the history of backgammon or back game which has been around for so long that the ancient Greeks were talking about it in fact I will tell you one story about back Devon the Greek historian Plutarch tells the story of Paris artists and an illegitimate daughter of a Persian Emperor and Paris artists his son was killed in battle and she swore like an ancient Cersei in fact by the way if you like Game of Thrones like george RR martin later has got nothing on actual history which I know is a dweeby thing to say but like seriously there are actual plot beats from Game of Thrones that actually happened anyway Paris artist said I'm gonna kill everybody and she did with the exception of one eunuch who she couldn't kill because he was so well liked and so Paris artists said hey she went to the king and she said let's play backgammon fine and she lost as she lost and she lost and she lost she lost 1,000 gold Derek's then finally she says okay she's drunk let's play one more time but this time let's make it interesting if I win I get to kill the eunuch and of course then she beats the [ __ ] out of him and then she not only kills the eunuch she skins him she put him on a stake and how he dies looking at his own skin so that's backgammon as I said before I'm gonna gloss over the invention of playing cards and I will show you that however the earliest surviving playing cards from China and he's so cute I love this this could have this could have been invented today so instead and now we're gonna talk about the printing press now at school I learned weight was invented in Germany and 1439 yarns Gutenberg through the invention of creation of pamphlets was able to dismantle and dismantle millennia old power structures and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah but of course what my history teachers didn't tell me is the printing press allowed us in Europe to manufacture board games for the first time now Europe was always gonna make perhaps interesting board games considering being a very Christian area had a very complicated relationship to games and gambling in facts like a dark timeline shut up and sit down in 1452 a priest was able to deliver a sermon on the evils of gambling so convincing that the population of Nuremberg built bonfire and burned 3640 backgammon boards so what is this nation gonna make now they're actually able to make board games well some of you might be aware of a switch game called untitled goose game now just to prove there is nothing new Under the Sun the earliest board game manufactured by the printing press in I believe that I'm a date I was given that I don't quite believe is 1587 say hello to the Royal game of the goose aka the game of the goose aka titled goose game now first off this game sucks it's a race game players roll dice and they move their piece from one all the way through the ends but it is a first it is an invention it is the first game with like Geographics the first sort of geographical game because there are spaces like a bridge there's a labyrinth there's a jail and if you land on those spaces they all have their own rules this is basically talisman all right but also for reasons I was quite literally unable to determine in my research there's loads of geese and if you land on a goose then your movement is doubles but what's great about the goose game is the its it broken the earliest game of the goose had a goose on space 9 so if you roll two dice and land on space 9 there's a goose which doubles your move to space 18 where there's a goose which double to move to space 27 where there's a goose all the way through - oh that's sorry I should also mention space 58 death um but yeah if you were all a 9 on the first turn you just get catapulted straight to the end and win before anyone else has taken a turn what's depressing about the game of the goose is that via God it was played in Europe for something like four centuries it is the most monstrous example of this monopoly thing where people just keep playing in this thing even though it's not good but like monopoly the game of the goose got different versions as people try and sex it up which gives us the game of the goose but all the spaces eggs or my favorite the game of the goose but we're going inside a goose in this players enter ominously through the eye of the goose travel through its guts track go perilously close to the rectum and then finally end the game which symbolizes the goose laying an egg or in fancier versions of the game a golden egg game of the goose incidentally three point four on BoardGameGeek it's also the only time I've seen the color-coding of the of the rating be read I didn't even know it did that okay so gosh I need some more water we're doing good we're doing good my time travelers we're we've only got a few hundred years ago okay designer I'm creditors so while Europe's playing the game of the goose for a few hundred years and nothing interesting is happening I'm going to take you on a little diversion I'm gonna tell you the story of the world's first casino now I know you some of you want care a casinos you will care about this one so this happen in Venice the Venetian government were going spare because you have these rooms called to read or let me read or write I forget they were rooms called they had a name and the name let me tell you it was yeah it was the result it was the red dot II which according to gambling historian David Schwartz probably comes from the verb read der to reduce or make clothes these were private rooms basically Nobles would have a room in their house you'd come in knock on the door and then you go in and you'd gamble and the nobles would take money from you but it was untaek scible so eventually Venice the government of Venice said fine Oh what if what if we do the gambling what if we take one of the government-owned palaces and open a wing of it and people can come in and we do all the gambling and it was the world's first casino and it was creepy as balls so what I love about the Ruidoso is that it represents this like as yet unmatched pinnacle of class and luxury and table gaming but also it's weird you see casinos are fascinating reflections of us as humans because over centuries they've been refined to strike it everything that caused the first ancient humans to throw knuckle bones and be delighted by the result today they are almost weaponized in their perfection you might not know this but casinos today designed by this like Bible which includes notes on how tight the pattern of the carpet should be so humans are slightly revolted look up but the lights are too bright so they look down so they force your eyes horizontally at the games and there's obvious stuff like there's no clocks and windows and the results are nailed a lot of this it was open like 24/7 check no windows check creepy masks people had to wear masks also when you came in there were stands selling refreshments that included wine yeah coffee yeah sausages so you've shown up in your mask and you've got a sausage if you're inserting it under the mask and you probably can't see anything because one of the things we know about the risotto is that there was a government mandate that every table had to have two candles and whether that was a minimum or a maximum it was definitely super super super dark but the best thing about the risotto is that all these people going around winning and losing fortunes couldn't be happy or sad the Rideau banned anyone going oh yes it was illegal you get thrown out if you got excited so if you roll the dice and lose the house you would enter the chamber of Sighs which was an almost pitch dark room full of sofas that you could collapse on and only in this room you go but the problem with that is while you're potentially crying at your lost home it's pretty someone having sex on the couch next to you because this was where the sex workers of the road ato would go to ply their trades in this pitch dark room but there's a great quote from when Venice eventually closed the roads also which from comes to us from a French historian by the way one of the people who went to the real toe Casanova there's all kinds of sexy stuff in the Rideau toes 300 years history but what we've got here this is a quote from the Papa Papa bomb the wife of a French gambler moneylenders looked sour as lemons shopkeepers can't sell a thing mask makers are starving and the bonobo noblemen accustomed to dealing cards ten hours a day find their hands are withering away casinos but incidentally next open at hot springs because there are a lot of people who when they care about fashion they were ill they would go to towns of hot springs they would sit in the water be bored out their mind and then they'd go to the casino casinos are pretty interesting in general I'm gonna stop talking Mike Recinos I mean talking about the board games whoa so so meanwhile as we jump back to board games this is 1759 this is a journey through Europe the first map game okay this is another first and it was put out by a map company who were looking for other ways to sell maps but you'll notice that crisscross is because it could be folded this is the first sort of foldable board that we know of and finally of course we've left the game of the goose so let's see what the manual says the first line of the manual of this game reads a journey through Europe is to be played in all respects like the game of the goose there are some really fun rules all the stuff on the left by the way is what happens if you land on different spaces including because this is a game made in Protestant England the quote he who rests at space 48 at Rome for kissing he Pope Stowe shall be banished for his folly to space for in the cold island of Iceland and miss three turns three okay right meanwhile in France which was generally a head of England in boardgame start this is 1780 1791 this is the scheudle of evolution for all cells and oh my god it's the goose came again as teaches the history of the French Revolution and what's interesting about this all the geese space are actually Parliament's but we cannot get away from this weird avian obsession with board game design so there were the parliaments but there were political cartoons that made the parliaments look like squawking birds will we break the gravity of these geese well I don't know hopefully soon but this is this is what happened in very religious Europe in our board games in the 17th and 18th century they had to be educational the only way you could really like get away with experiment again board game designers if you are at least teaching people someone and so this results in some amazing stuff in 1815 again yeah leave these birds alone but this is the swan of elegance this is a game teaching moral scenes but what we what we have here is the development of something new a last sort of so it was a game designed to be played with parents and their kids and the kids would land on a space and then the parent would consult a pamphlet and read them something so it's kinda if we reach like the first Dungeons & Dragons or as I call it ethics and geese to quote the slipcase of a different game this I'm completely stealing wholesale from British historian Holly Nielsen who actually has a short video on shallow pizza down to YouTube channel talking about Victorian games but in that she says referring to a different game but of the same style the new game of emulation all these sexy titles these games would quote teach children to cheerfully exert themselves to obtain an honorary prize while being perfectly aware of the consequences of disgrace and naturally dread it okay meanwhile oh god please make these games good eventually in 1822 we get the novel and elegant game of the bus - fruit is this fun no it's about penitentiaries or to use its full name the delicious game of the fruit basket : containing a literary treat for a party of juveniles and running over with choice subjects for the improvement for their improvement and diversion in various familiar scenes connected to Old England which is a bit of a mouthful so from now I'm gonna be using this acronym for it sadly only the design and title were delicious as the game dwelt mainly as I say on Penitentiary's but also trial by jury so you land on a space it's like mother what did it land on well you landed on the Royal Institute of blind people let me tell you about what it did Oh God okay right right where we are finally right next and the last board here I'm going to show you this is the game of human life and it is a stone's throw away from the invention of cardboard in 1850 and again it's very similar to the goose game but it's relevant for a reason that I will show you so this is a race game that takes you through a life which is a sort of step forward in terms of how abstract board games can be we're not traveling geographically but those board games that taught you history now they're sort of simulating a life so you would roll dice and starting until you travel through the seven stages of life oh sorry twelve oh all the phases were infancy Youth manhood prime of life sedate middle age old age decrepitude and dotage but every space was a different man kinda like the world's most banal version of Pokemon so you would land on a space and it would kind of I see this as like you know you land on space 20 and it's like Oh for this stage of my life I was a baker and then my friends like oh I was a politician or whatever so it kind of tells this is all it tells a story but with the invention of cardboard you can perhaps see how this came became the checkered game of life which of course became in later editions the game of life and so you can see just how far we've come thank you a lot guys that's been my talk [Applause] so a couple of things I want to I want to shout out briefly Tristan Donovan it's all a game is fantastic Justin Donovan is an author awesome author in it's all a game which I probably use more than anything for this talk he talks about various board games including the history of Monopoly clue all kinds of stuff Justin Donovan also if you're interested has a phenomenal book on the history of video games called replay which is both readable and exhaustive Ian Livingstone and James Wallace oh that shouldn't be in living there should be Ian Livingstone they have a new book called board games in 100 moves 8,000 years of play and then more edged case but Catherine Perry Hargreaves the history of playing cards it's more a collection of photography but also a history of books David Schwartz roll the bones a history of gambling is pretty interesting and special thanks to Holly Neilson incidentally there's lots of history I do want to do so perhaps in future shucks is if you enjoyed this talk there's been a be an opportunity in future for me to talk about things like the history of Magic the Gathering history of D&D the history of there's a I I got more up my sleeve but yeah thank you all very much for coming and have a great show [Applause]

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 175,130

Rating: 4.9615922 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, History, SHUX, lecture, TED Talk, mancala, chess

Id: Gov-qrjvOTc

Length: 43min 55sec (2635 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tlor180]

Quinton can talk about anything and make it hysterical. I love when he takes time to do these video essays.