Back to Square One: The Beginning of Board Games

Games and gamers have been around for quite a while. Workers scratched boards into the stones they used to build the pyramids. And the teenage pharaoh Tutankhamun was entombed together with a bunch of his favorite titles. Even the priesthood took a keen interest and reskinned a game that had been in the hotness for two millennia as a perilous journey of souls through the underworld. In other words, there is a lot to be learned about games by looking not only ahead but also behind.

This talk takes you back to the beginning of board games in the ancient Bronze Age cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. It shows how games originated at the crossroads between ritual, divination, education, and entertainment. And how games that are often considered abstract, such as go, chess, mancala, and backgammon, were once invested with themes and narratives that would make most modern games pale in comparison.

The talk is roughly 45-minutes in length with an additional question and answer period afterwards.

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen is a Danish historian of board games based in Berlin, Germany. He is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University. He also forms half of the game design duo Hopeless Games.

Research: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/jschmidtmadsen

Games: https://www.hopelessgames.com/

Host or Publisher The Crypt