ANCIENT BOARD GAMES

Some games have been around for over 4,000 years. Some games have disappeared from history, but archaeologists have worked to discover the rules. Here are three of them:

Latrunculi was a two-player strategy board game. It was the most popular thinking game in the Roman Empire. It is said to resemble chess, but is generally accepted to be a game of military tactics. The game required armies of black and white pieces to fight across boards made with wood, marble, stone, or silver.

Patolli was a race and gambling game on a cross-shaped board. Each player must have the same number of items to bet at the beginning of the game. Before they started to bet, players would meet and inspect the items each other had. They bet blankets, plants, precious stones, gold, food or, in some cases, their homes and sometimes their family and freedom.

Go was invented in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest board game that is still played today. It is a strategy board game in which the aim is to surround more areas than the opponent. The playing pieces are called “stones”. One player uses the white stones and the other uses black. The players take turns placing the stones on the empty points of a board with a 19×19 grid of lines.