This essay considers how a historical legacy of printed games dating back to the sixteenth century in Italy laid the foundation for modern board games like those produced by Milton Bradley. The technology of print and the broad publics it reached enabled the spread of a common gaming culture- one built upon shared visual structures in game boards. Modern board games, of course, relied upon similar rules and replicated the ludic functions of their Renaissance progenitors. But perhaps more importantly, they built upon and perpetuated entrenched narratives about how fortune and morality contributed to lived experiences, presenting their viewers and players with a familiar printed imagination of the game of life.

Review of Tim Penn (2023) Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Medieval Archaeology, 67:1, 228-229, DOI: 10.1080/00766097.2023.2204739

This dissertation addresses the social significance of parlour games as forms of cultural expression in medieval and early modern England and France by exploring how the convergence of textual materialities, players, and narratives manifested in interactive texts, board games, and playing cards. Medieval games, I argue, do not always fit neatly into traditional or modern theoretical game models, and modern blanket definitions of ‘game’—often stemming from the study of digital games—provide an anachronistic understanding of how medieval people imagined their games and game-worlds. Chapter 1 explores what the idea of ‘game’ meant for medieval authors, readers, and players in what I call ‘game-texts’—literary texts that blurred the modern boundaries between what we would consider ‘game’ and ‘literature’ and whose mechanics are often thought to be outside the definition of ‘game.’ Chapter 2 examines how recreational mathematics puzzles and chess problems penned in manuscript collections operate as sites of pleasure, edification, and meditative playspaces in different social contexts from the gentry households to clerical cloisters. The mechanics, layout, narrative, and compilation of chess problems rendered them useful for learning the art and skill of the game in England. Chapter 3 traces the circulation, manuscript contexts, and afterlives of two game-text genres in England—the demandes d’amour and the fortune-telling string games—in order to understand how they functioned as places of engagement and entertainment for poets, scribes, and players. Chapter 4 illustrates how narrative and geography became driving forces for the development and rise of the modern thematic game in Early Modern Europe. This chapter charts how changing ideas of spatiality enabled tabletop games to shift from abstract structures enjoyed by players in the Middle Ages, in which game narratives take place off a board, to ludic objects that incorporated real-life elements in their design of fictional worlds—thereby fashioning spaces that could visually accommodate narrative on the board itself. This dissertation places games into a more nuanced historical and cultural context, showing not only the varied methods by which medieval players enjoyed games but also how these ideas developed and changed over time.

You might have been there: losing a cherished piece from your favourite boardgame and searching for a way to still play without it. Perhaps you used a substitute: a coin, a piece of cardboard, or a piece from another gaming set, or you bought a new one from the specialist retailers which now cater to this niche market. Abundant finds of gaming pieces from a huge variety of contexts across the Roman world underline that accidental loss of gaming paraphernalia is by no means a modern phenomenon, but little attention has been given to the impact of losing a gaming piece on the experience of ancient board gaming. This paper suggests that we may occasionally be able to detect evidence for substitutions in “patchwork” gaming sets, which comprise an asymmetrical mix of counters of different styles or materials. This asymmetry may arguably sometimes arise from a set of counters composed over time, as pieces are lost, broken, or given away, whether as gifts to the living or to the dead. We suggest that the object biographies of gaming sets made up of a mixture of materials would have evoked the memory of past games and previous gaming partners. PALLAS , 119, 2022, pp. 241-262

Résumé/Abstract Competitive board games, played on the ground, on the floor or on wooden boards, provide entertainment, distraction and exercise for the mind—it is hard to believe that north-west Europe was ever without them. But the authors here make a strong ...

This contribution draws together a corpus of c.100 gaming boards from Roman Britain cataloged by type. The data show that three types of games were played in Britain during the Roman period with a heavy emphasis on game playing among military communities, though board gaming also took place to a lesser degree in rural and urban civilian contexts. PDF available upon request.

ISSN 2634-4491 When we think about games in the Roman world, many of us may first conjure up vivid images of the arena; it is perhaps less likely that our immediate thoughts will be of board games. The study of Roman board games has until recently focussed on the reconstruction of gaming rules from textual references and surviving board de-signs. New work is now increasingly putting the social aspect of leisure time into greater fo-cus, through the collation and analysis of corpora of gaming paraphernalia, primarily boards, dice and counts. This datasheet arises from a research project undertaken by the authors which aimed to unite the evidence for all gaming boards in Roman Britain and to examine their distribution (for a preliminary report, see Courts and Penn 2019). It will provide a concise guide to the identifi-cation and significance of known board game types from Roman Britain. A full digital catalogue of over 100 boards, along with a detailed analysis, will be published elsewhere.

In 2009 three early French printed board games were auctioned in Vendôme. They all bore the address of a completely unknown printseller, the Veuve Charles Petit, in the rue Montorgueil in Paris. These three woodcuts shed a new light on the Paris print trade of the early 17th century.