Board Games of the Ancient World | Hacker News Reader

Board Games of the Ancient World

smithsonianmag.com

209 pointsCrankyBear66 comments

One thing I learned only recently was the Romans had a version of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses, Xs and Os, etc) that is (IMHO) superior to the modern version.

While any capable player will always draw in the modern version, the ancient one gives each player only three pieces. To place a new one, an old must be removed. On the surface at least, this seems to result in a much more strategic game.

I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

One thing that I've learned over the years playing modern board games is that the vast majority of the population is too intellectually lazy to bother learning new games. They'd rather keep playing their (outdated) classics that they know than learn new and better-designed games.

Monopoly! Woo!!

Monotony? ... for some reason I never had a problem playing Risk in college even though it would last all night (or more). Playing a six-hour game of Monopoly was only fun for the first couple of hours.

Monopoly should rarely, if ever, last more than 45 minutes. Assuming Of Course you are playing by the rules. All properties landed on must sell - even if by auction, no free parking payout, chance cards are not optional, no banker loans, and there are a finite number of houses which caps development for the late-comers.

It's as ruthless and unpleasant as a game of Sorry but that's the point, capitalism is only great when you're winning.

You are exactly right, because Monopoly was literally invented as a propaganda device to show how awful capitalism is. The game was literally meant to be unpleasant and soul-draining. But... something went wrong. People took it at face value, and claim to be enjoying the experience. Stockholm Syndrome?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game#Descript...

Well, I enjoy playing it, and appreciate the message. The best bit for me is the auctioning of the properties, however.

Met the US chamption of Monopoly in LA at a boardgame meetup in 2010. I asked him how he found enough interest in the game to continue playing to such a level, since it was so shallow/predictable. He replied immediately that Monopoly was really just about convincing people to give you what you want. Turns out he was a lawyer.

This is largely because they're looking for a social activity first and foremost, and don't much care about the particular rules.

A lot of these people that "don't want to learn something new" will learn that new thing if enough of their friends/family are interested.

As somebody who has played a lot of different board games with a lot of different random people, its a huge time investment to learn a game, especially a complex one, that you might only end up playing one time.

I'm not only talking about complex games. Even something like Azul, which takes 5-8 minutes to teach and 45 minutes to play is met with reluctance from non-initiated people.

I don't expect any non-gamer to sit through a 40-minute explanation, obviously. However, I wouldn't call an hour-long game (including teach) a "huge time investment".

45 minutes of board game I likely won't like is a lot. In any case, games popular among causual players (including me) tend to be much shorter.

Plus, no game that claims 45 in box or even take that long with experienced players ever take 45 min first time. It is usually double the claimed time.

...and they also often delegate boardgames to "child's play". Having done that, they pre-emptively dismiss new board games because they're - by definition - for kids.

By whose definition? There are more board games labelled 14+ releasing every year than there ever was

Many people are deeply afraid of or do not enjoy losing competitive games. Further, they may also fairly associate the effort of learning a new game with an experienced player a prelude to losing. So their behavior could be fairly seen as 'pain avoidance' or 'enjoyment optimization'. Few people are motivated by intellectual stimulation or curiosity beyond childhood years.

The blame lies largely with the experienced players for failing to give sufficient handicap. If you're teaching somebody how to play Go, start with a 9x9 board and give them 5 stones. If you're teaching Arimaa, give them something like four rabbits, one horse, the camel, and the elephant. Dial back the handicap whenever they win a game, which at those starting handicaps should be from the very beginning.

A player who is just starting go won't even win with 5 stones on 9x9 for a while, but this is still good advice.

I'm always fascinated by people who not only stick to the same basic, boring classics, but they've adopted "house rules" of some sort over the years that they INSIST on playing by, because "that's what they're used to." And then they know how to cheat using the house rules they've come up with, and all their creative efforts become focused entirely on cheating the dumb, inconsistent rules, rather than any actual sense of tactical strategy.

It's like, come on! If you used the same creativity for coming up with real game strategy that you use to trick the other humans in the room and skirt the rules, you'd be really, honestly, good at this game. But people are unwilling to put that kind of direct accountability on themselves, for fear of failure I suppose.

They win and rule by dictacting the world their own rules. Clever they are. Why risk a loss to anothers rules when you can win by enforcing your own rules on them?

My guess is it was played on paper. Pens were the dominant writing utensil. Hard to remove and repeat on the same surface.

Even with pencils, erasing leaves a mark and doing so repeatedly will either become too hard to tell or rip through the paper.

The Romans didn't have paper, and pencils were invented in the 16th Century. I think they had chalk, but they almost certainly would have used playing pieces on a board.

My response is why the modern one is not the Roman variant

Standard Roman equipment for temporary writing was a slab of wax (in a supportive folder of some type) and a stylus.

We had to do something similar for our Intro to CS course at Tufts years ago: implement both a tic-tac-toe game and an algorithm that would play optimally. Second stage of the project was that, after a player's third move, the oldest "X" or "O" would disappear each turn. I have no idea if they still use that project, but the feeling when your computer player started working and you couldn't beat it was like nothing else, and was one of the reasons I went into CS rather than Economics.

I also had to implement a Tic Tac Toe "AI" when I was in college about a decade ago. Last year I was revisiting my college files backup and decided to upload it into GitHub:

- https://github.com/TCGV/TicTacToe.

The AI player was implemented using the Minimax algorithm, and can never be beaten ;)

Sorry very tangential.

One time I wrote something like this, and shared on reddit. Like you, I used minimax to solve tic tac toe. My comment was downvoted to oblivion and one highly upvoted person wrote:

> You don't need "AI" to solve tic tac toe, it's a solved problem!

And here's a picture of the solution. https://xkcd.com/832/

Could fit on a sheet of paper indeed.

Someone actually implemented a tic-tac-toe player in Reddit comments using character graphics and cross-comment links.

Damn...

Even though it truly is a solved problem, it's much more intuitive (and fun) to implement a tic-tac-toe solver from scratch using minimax than any lookup tables heuristic.

Since it is a generic solution, I believe the minimax solver can also be easily modified to implement an "AI" player for that Roman version of the game as well, where pieces are removed.

By the way, using minimax was also one of that college task requirements!

Brings back memories. I think implementing an AI for tic-tac-toe was one of my first complete implementations of a RL algorithm; circa 2008, I think :)

> I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

Cause it is the one you teach small kids when they are bored and you have nothing except pen and paper at hand.

They don't know optimal strategy yet. And it is fun when they finally find it out.

Seems like a materialistic evolution. If you're using pieces, picking them up and moving them seems natural. If you're writing it down, it's not as intuitive to erase and rewrite.

> I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

Humans are getting dumber with each generation. Things get dumbed down over time. You can observe this everywhere.

The way we played tic-tac-toe as kids is with three pebbles, so like the Romans, but one can move a pebble only to an adjacent position. Unfortunately, there's a winning algorithm for whoever starts.

A lot of this article is inaccurate: https://twitter.com/CuseKicks/status/1225417738656604160

I am excited for the book he mentions working on about games from an archaeological perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

25 minutes of "Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur". Great to watch.

Irving Finkel's lectures are marvelous. Watching his lecture on the decipherment of cuneiform is a delight, both in subject matter and in the delivery of a well worn and thoroughly polished presentation. (If only all professors were so articulate and passionate.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBA

I love playing Backgammon, I find it to be an almost perfect blend of skill and luck, while also being much more accessible than something like chess. It's easy enough to learn on the fly, and after only a few games you start recognizing patterns and strategies and it really motivates you to get better. I find it's a pretty good way to get a more intuitive grasp on probability as well.

It's also easy to teach other how to play and get hooked. I have lunch at the same spot almost every day, and I bring a backgammon rollup travel set with me so I can play with whomever might be interested in a game. Most often it'll be the owner or her staff (I've taught six of them how to play, so far!) but sometimes random people will come up and say "what's that game" and we're off to the races. Great conversation starter!

Backgammon has gained some new popularity since computer programs appeared that were able to beat humans and more importantly, analyze the games afterwards. The game is now played more as a game of skill than of luck: there are some backgammon sites that rate your play according to computer analysis, e.g. https://backgammongalaxy.com/. If you're interested you should give it a try.

I have tried it actually, but thanks for the tip anyway! :o)

I'm curious about this surge in popularity though. Where I am (Sweden) most people seem to know about backgammon, but not many know how to play so can't say I recognize that surge. Regardless, people mostly seem keen to learn which is great fun for me since I love to teach, and it's a great feeling when they win without any help on strategy or moves. :o)

If you'd like to see some good players in action: there are a few backgammon tournaments in Sweden with some world class participants. For instance https://dubbel5.se/tournaments/SO2109.html

Sometimes I look at my closet filled to the brim with expensive boardgames, sometimes packed with well-honed mechanics and expensive miniatures, and consider the irony of the fact that in our age of ceaseless digital distraction, we have more offline entertainment than ever before. Surely someone in the 18th century (AD or BCE) would more greatly appreciate the embarrassment of board-gaming riches we have today.

Same for Steam accounts / cellphones vs. 80s consoles / portable handheld gaming systems.

I'm sure ancient peoples had much more opportunity to play outside. They didn't have our resources, but they had lots of playing field. Lots of room for throwing stones, darts, climbing. If you were old or unathletic you could still collect mushrooms or berries - that's a game of perception and patience. Singing or instrument playing contests, fishing contests. Or "let-see-who-can-grow-the-biggest-pumpkin" contest.We increasingly live in cities and going outside often means going into noise or crowd.

My point: I'm sure many games they played were not on boards. They didn't have to be.

Cool to see the Tafl games in this article! Being part Welsh, I've researched and (tried to) played "tawlbwrdd" with a printed paper board and a few coins. I'm thinking about turning a maple tree (and a bit of black walnut) that we had cut down into heirloom games for my kids (they used to climb in those trees).

http://tafl.cyningstan.com/page/172/tawlbwrdd

The game of the goose sounds a lot like Candy Land.

> A race governed purely by chance, the competition involves “not the slightest element of skill or true player interaction towards the winning of stakes

This seems to describe the gameplay of candy land: literally no way to make your self lose any more than you already are. You are simply at the whim of where the next card you draw tells you to go.

I used to live candy land as a kid and now that I'm older I hate it because it's all luck and there's no strategy in it. My favorite right now is Splendor.

On a couple of occasions I have actually seen such ancient game boards in different places in Italy. Here's one from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaming_Board_in_the_...

I especially like the thought that countless people have played on the same board for whole generations. It was a public pass-time that brought people together.

Is there evidence that it was actually used for playing games? The irregular placement of the divots makes it look like a kind of vandalism that was popular when I was in school, where people would surreptitiously use coins to grind divots in walls while waiting for class.

I don't have any definitive proof at hand, but it was mentioned in the brochure for the Baths of Caracalla. Here's a photo with a longer description: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/287951/48703648

I think this kind of stuff was relatively common throughout the Roman world.

It's more obviously a game board in this photo. The irregular placement increases the difficulty of the game.

The cathedrals of Ourense and León in Spain have a few game boards etched in stone at discreet places. Some of them look like Nine Men Morris (Alquerque?) boards: http://jesus-manuel.com/2015/08/08/658/ (in Spanish) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alquerque

Not mentioned in the article: Snakes and Ladders. Was real fun to play with my son, especially coming up with new rules after while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Ladders

It is mentioned, just under the name of goose.

It's also fun to experiment with Markov chains with Snakes and Ladders.

The History Blog [1] (a great read daily) has a post today (coincidentally) on a recently unearthed Viking era "hnefatafl" piece, probably a king. Dug up on Lindisfarne, a holy island site off the coast of Northumbria in England. It's a lovely piece of decorated azure glass. The post is worth a (short) read.

[1] http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/57805

I was disappointed that the chosen games were ones that we don't have rules to play them.

The Royal Game of Ur is an ancient game where we actually have the rules. It's easy to make a board for it, and it plays great. My recommendation is to to play it with 4 coins or other 2 sided randomizers instead of a 4 sided die, because I find a normal curve more satisfying than flat probability.

The royal game of Ur sounded familiar. They released a boxed version is the 70s I vaguely remember..

Board game geek has a summary: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1602/royal-game-ur

Interesting.. backgammon and chess seem to have thrived..

Here's a video of Tom Scott playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

Game of go have been played since Spring and Autumn period (~500 BC), at the time, it's just called 'The Board Game'.

Quite a few variation happened, at the time it was played on 17*17 board and with 4 existing stones at the beginning. But the general rule (which was so simple) persisted.

There was an ancient game I found an article on a few years back that I have been unable to find again. It (I believe) was an Asian game and had over 400 distinct pieces, each with their own rules for movement. Does that sound familiar to anyone? I’m striking out with google...

> over 400 distinct pieces, each with their own rules for movement

I doubt it'd exist. It's hard to place 400 pieces on board, hard to remember 400 different movement patterns, it takes forever to setup the game.

Shogi is asian game with 15 types of pieces.

There's this probably never widely played shogi variant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikyoku_shogi

"Each player has a set of 402 wedge-shaped pieces of 209 types. The players must remember 253 sets of moves."

That’s it! Thank you!

Makes me wonder about how these games evolved over time and why we have the modern versions we do now. Are the games we have today really more "fun" or is there something in these that we've been missing and have to experience?

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