Board game

A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects (game pieces) that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the term "board game" are between the 1840s and 1850s.

While game boards are a necessary and sufficient condition of this genre, card games that do not use a standard deck of cards, as well as games that use neither cards nor a game board, are often colloquially included, with some referring to this genre generally as "table and board games" or simply "tabletop games".

Eras

Ancient era

Board games have been played, traveled, and evolved in most cultures and societies throughout history. They have been discovered in several archaeological sites, and there are several contenders for the oldest game, depending on the exact requirements applied and the accuracy of dating.

Archaeological finds of game boards exist that date from as early as the Neolithic period, including, as of 2024, a total of 14 sites reporting 51 game boards, ranging from the early 7000s BC to the mid-6000s BC.

Some of the oldest discovered gaming pieces have been discovered in southwest Turkey, including a set of elaborate sculptured stones in sets of four, speculated to be designed for a chess-like game, which were created during the Bronze Age around 3000 BC.

Senet has been argued to be the oldest known board game in the world, with possible game board fragments (c. 3100 BC) and undisputed pictorial representations (c. 2686 BC – c. 2613 BC) having been found in ancient Egyptian Predynastic and First Dynasty burials dating as far back as 3500 BC. However, while Senet was played for thousands of years, it fell out of fashion sometime after AD 400 during the Roman period; the rules were never written down, therefore they are not decisively known.

Similarly, Mehen, also from ancient Egypt, is one of the oldest games dated with reasonable confidence, at c. 3000 BC – c. 2300 BC, with some estimating it dates back to c. 3500 BC. The rules, scoring system, and game pieces, however, are also unknown or speculative.

The Royal Game of Ur is estimated to have originated around 2500 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, with specimens found in royal tombs. It has been claimed to be the oldest playable board game in the world, with well-defined game rules discovered written on a cuneiform tablet by a Babylonian astronomer in c. 177 BC – c. 176 BC.

Another game similar to the Royal Game of Ur was discovered in 1977 by the Italian Archaeological Mission in grave no. 731, a pseudo-catacomb grave at Shahr-i Sokhta, a UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site in Iran.