Early modern board games

Since before the beginning of recorded history, board games have been a constant source of fascination and entertainment for human beings. From 7000-year-old bone dice and the Ancient Egyptian religious game of Senet to the spread of chess throughout medieval Eurasia, the history of board games is as sprawling, oftentimes mysterious, and complex as history itself. Though sometimes correctly characterized as meaningless fun or simple distractions, board games have also been assigned varying degrees of spiritual, cultural, and competitive importance. Often this importance can be examined not only to learn more about board games but also about the people who played them. In History of Board Games Throughout the Ages, we take a general look at the history of board games from ancient to modern times, including some of the most popular and influential board games ever played, their various roles in the societies and cultures they occupied, and the reasons why board games are so compelling and fun for us humans in the first place.

This is the English version of a two-part paper published in French.
The Game of the Owl is a simple gambling game in which the players pay to or take stakes from a pool according to the throw of dice. The paper analyses versions of this game into five types, based on their iconography and detailed rules. Although the earliest surviving example is Italian, dating from the late 16th century, the analysis suggests an earlier origin,  in Germany. The iconographic links with the Till Eulenspiegel legends are explored.

Glückshaus is a relatively modern version of the larger family of Games of Seven (games played with two six-sided dice and a stake board with fields usually numbered 2-12, often with an emphasized 7.). This paper looks at various historical versions of the game and shows how the modern Glückshaus version and its pecularities (e.g. a missing field for the number 4) came about when the dice game was combined with a stake board for a card game.

The Bodleian Library's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera contains three examples of the early printed board game, The Royal Pastime of Cupid or Entertaining Game of the Snake. According to Digital Bodleian records, one was published by James Lumsden & Son, c. 1810; another by Laurie & Whittle, 1794; and the third by William Dicey, also 1794.

This paper provides some account of the game and its relation to the Game of the Goose; it discusses the three Bodleian examples and presents evidence to show the date of the Dicey publication is likely to have been at least half a century earlier than the 1794 date stated in the catalogue (i.e. between 1736–1740); that is, between the dates William Dicey acquires the Bow Churchyard press and Cluer Dicey becomes a partner and the Dicey imprint changes to “W. & C. Dicey” or “Dicey & Co”.

Games were important to the Augsburg art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647) and this ludic category was included in most of his art cabinets. It offered amusement as part of an overall ambition for the cabinets to be of both service and use. Board games, dice, packs of cards and games of both chance and skill represented many of the various game types of their day, while constituting a material taxonomy of games. The encyclopaedic ambition of a Kunstkammer is apparent, and games provide an insight into courtly practices of the early modern period. This thesis investigates Hainhofer's relationship with games through the materiality of the extant games of his art cabinets-board games, playing cards, miscellaneous games and games paraphernalia. Via a material culture studies framework, it sets their design in a late Renaissance context while also examining how contemporary game practices influenced game design and use. Further, the games, their placements within the cabinets and other associated material traces are used to reconstruct original, now lost, games and how they would function in an art cabinet. It further explores the progression of Hainhofer attitudes towards games over a period of more than thirty years, and devises the hypothesis that he, to a certain degree, formed, rather than conformed to, the taste of his patrons and clients in terms of games. Games were evidently required by Hainhofer to be at the inventive and artistic forefront, just as important as technical, scientific, natural or colonial discoveries would be to any Kunstkammer owner.

The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera contains three examples of the early printed board game The Royal Pastime of Cupid, Or Entertaining Game of the Snake. While this paper will discuss all three examples, which are dated to either the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century, one of its main concerns will be to present evidence to provide a publication date for one particular example, the print published by William Dicey, which currently lacks a firm publication date in the John Johnson catalogue. The Bodleian's bibliographic record attributes a broad publication date of 1700–1750, although the Dicey imprint variant used makes it possible to establish a more precise publication date, c. 1736–1740. The article also identifies the three "types" of iconography used in the final square of Cupid games published in Britain. These are: Cupid honing his arrow in a formal garden; Cupid alone with his bow; and a peasant couple dancing in a hortus conclusus app...