Before Modern Board Games: What Did Humans Play 6,000 Years Ago? | Walter Crist

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Humans have been playing board games for at least 6,000 years. Maybe even longer, much longer. This is a pastime that has endured for millennia. But before the likes of Monopoly, exploding kittens, and snakes and ladders, what board games were early humans playing? How complex were they, and would we find them fun to play today? In this episode, we're going back to some of the earliest board games ever discovered, from Bronze Age Egypt to the Roman Empire, and we'll explore one incredible mystery, a 2000-year-old game that no one understood until recently, when my guest today used AI to finally decode how it works. I'm Oli Giu, and this is what we did before, the podcast that charts the history of everyday life. I just want to welcome the many new people who've discovered the podcast recently. Thank you for joining us. Please subscribe if you get a chance, it helps out massively. Now, let me introduce you to Walter Christ, an expert in the archaeology and history of board games based at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Walter Christ, welcome to what we did before. It is a pleasure having you on the show. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for reaching out and thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm just so fascinated that there is a sort of a field of expertise that can explore the archaeology of ancient board games. That is just incredible to me. How far back in history do we see the earliest evidence of humans playing board games?

SPEAKER_01 1:32 It depends on how you want to interpret the archaeological evidence. For sure, we can see back to about almost 6,000 years ago, the first thing that we can really say is a gaming set was buried with a woman in a tomb in Egypt. It's this little clay table with a set of pieces, and it's now in a museum in Brussels. But that's the first thing that we could really say, okay, this really looks like a game, the kind of games that we uh recognize as board games now. But you can look a little bit even further back to that, and there are other things that look like game boards, even going back 9,000 years ago. There's some kind of discussion amongst uh archaeologists and other games experts whether these are actually games back that far. Um I tend to think that they could be, and part of this uncertainty has to do with how we play and the things that we play with. So archaeology can tell us really when people start making things that look like board games. But if you look at ethnographic evidence, people tend to play with holes or lines on the ground and grab some stones and then play like that. Those are things that archaeologists are very rarely, if ever, are going to find. And I think that was happening a long time before uh people were actually making things. So as far as we can tell for sure, 6,000 years ago, maybe 9,000 years ago, and before that, who knows?

SPEAKER_00 3:05 Yeah, I I I do wonder um if, as you know, somebody in your profession, whether you sort of look at many things and go, well, that could be a board game.

SPEAKER_01 3:14 Yeah, I mean, I do certainly other archaeologists often overlook the possibility that something can be a board game. So we have, for instance, all these little clay objects that are often cones or discs uh or other small shapes that are the shapes that we technically see for game pieces, but people, you know, attribute them to other kinds of interpretations. But I'm looking at them and I'm like, those those are those look a lot like game pieces to me. Um, so a lot of it is like having the eye for what it is uh and what it can be. I think games have been somewhat overlooked in archaeology as something that's not important because we should be talking about politics and economics, you know, the important stuff. But I think the evidence is there, we just have to start looking for it a little bit more carefully.

SPEAKER_00 4:04 Yeah, I guess because even if you were to be um a modern board game was to be placed in front of you and you were told play, you know, most people would have no clue. Like, okay, what do I do? Do I uh is there a dice involved in this? Do I am I supposed to be moving in a clockwise direction? Like without a rule book, you have no clue where you're at. And it's the same with the archaeology, right? You're maybe dealing with old, ancient sort of stone tablets which have inscriptions on it, but beyond that, you don't have a rule book, you don't have necessarily all the pieces that we use to play a board game. It becomes quite difficult, you and you can just use it as a modern comparison, quite difficult to even figure out where to begin. It can be very difficult.

SPEAKER_01 4:43 We have certain clues uh from for certain games at certain times and certain places. When we know that our game exists, we'll usually have the board and maybe some pieces with it, maybe dice if it has dice. Occasionally we have artistic representations of people playing games. You see a lot of, for instance, Egyptian tomb paintings that show people playing games, so we know they exist. More rarely you have uh some written information about them. So in those same tomb paintings in Egypt, you'll have captions of the players speaking, and often they will be saying something that's happening in the game. So you'll have like these little snippets, which are really cool. But yeah, rules and especially complete sets of rules are very, very rare, especially in the ancient world, because what we're talking about here is something a little bit different from what we usually experience now, even though we do still experience it in a similar way. Um, these kinds of traditional board games, which are the kinds of things that you learn growing up, or learn from your parents, learn from your siblings, learn from friends, or maybe you go someplace else and learn it from somewhere in in a faraway land. These are the kinds of games that you just everybody knows how to play. It's the kind of thing like tic-tac-toe or checkers or things like this that we all know we probably never read the rules before we played it. We probably don't even remember when we learned it, we just always know. You know, versus the kind of commercial board game where okay, you have to write down the rules so that you can sell it to somebody who's never met the creator of it, right? That's what we're dealing with in the ancient world, are these kinds of traditional games. And so we can get bits and pieces from the archaeological, the artistic, and the textual representation and the textual evidence for it. And then what we tend to do is look toward ethnographic evidence for other kinds of traditional games and draw from that to kind of try to make conclusions about how you might be able to play uh a game that looks a certain way.

SPEAKER_00 6:49 It's really interesting that you bring up checkers because um, or drafts as well. Um I inherited a a really old copy of drafts from my nanny uh when she passed away. It was the one thing I I asked to keep from her house, and all my sisters got various other things and trinkets that they remembered her by, but that was the one thing I really remembered her by was this draft set, and she you know taught me how to play, and eventually I could beat her even as a very young child. And you mentioned just how important board games should be in archaeology, but perhaps aren't. And actually, I think that's a demonstration, a very small demonstration, of just how important they are in sort of early development and in creating bonds and forming relationships and memories as well. I I don't know, I I feel like it's just a subtle um hint towards why board games are important to investigate. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 7:43 Um, this is something that m my research has focused on kind of the social importance of games and how they function as a kind of social lubricant between people, right? Um and this is how you see board games spreading across the world, you know, pretty easily in terms of uh in terms of ideas, because it's it's not just that the game helps you to interact with other people, but it's also you can see it spreading in a way that you may not be able to see other kinds of ideas spreading. Certain games are tied to certain cultures, they are really kind of embedded and traditional to that culture, and it gets passed down through generations like like drafts, uh like your grandma's drafts, and it's interesting because it can change through time as well. Uh, so I assume that you are playing uh in the what we call English drafts, but here where I live in the Netherlands, they play it differently. It's on a 10x10 board rather than the usual 8x8, which is a really interesting thing, how it can change through time, you know, it can even become very specific to certain locations. So it's a part of it's a part of our heritage, um, but it's not something that has been really focused on a lot, um, in part because it is a little bit intangible.

SPEAKER_00 9:00 And you mentioned that perhaps we've seen some evidence from 9,000 years ago of these early board games, and that obviously agriculture really sort of got going 10,000 years ago. Um, do we think there were board games or hints of any board game playing with without having archaeological evidence of that happening before agriculture, or do you think it really only started manifesting once we were able to sort of stay in one place for a long time?

SPEAKER_01 9:26 The way I see it is that we start seeing it archaeologically with agriculture because people are starting to settle down, and then you can make things out make things specifically for playing with them that you then keep that you wouldn't want to be carrying around with you if you're a hunter, gatherer, or nomad in some way. Then also what you really start to get is of course the accumulation of wealth, and so then you can take the time to spend thing that you can just play with. Uh right, the the game set from Egypt, even though it was on a simple clay uh it was a simple clay table, the woman that it was buried with had gold jewelry and other things in her tomb. So um she was a wealthy person. So you there is a connection there, and you see it all through history, this kind of conspicuous leisure almost, where some people have the ability to be able to spend time and resources on playing that other stone. And uh there is plenty of ethnographic evidence that you know, hunter-gatherers, people who are not really practicing agriculture do play board games, but it is this more kind of the game lives in your head, and then when you want to play it, you make it, you gather the things you need, and then you do it, and then it's gone. So you don't have to carry it around with you.

SPEAKER_00 11:43 I want to talk about um something that you recently were able to uncover using AI, which I find absolutely fascinating. So you used AI to figure out the rules of a stone game board dating to the late Roman Empire, which is this incredible discovery where I and I think the story goes that you were sort of just walking past it in in an exhibit or something like that. Could you tell us about this discovery?

SPEAKER_01 12:06 Yeah, sure. So it was actually this was, I believe it was 2021. It was a break in COVID lockdowns, and I needed to get out and go see some ancient stuff, go to a museum. And there was a museum uh nearby where I was living in the town called Herlen here in the Netherlands, where there was a Roman bathhouse and they've excavated it and built this really nice museum around it. Um, and on display they had this object that was a stone with a bunch of lines and a geometric pattern on it that they had on display as uh a Roman game board. It was interesting to me because the pattern on the board was unlike any other game board that I had seen. It wasn't a pattern I recognized. A lot of the times you will see that the geometric pattern of the board is a very specific uh shape. Like like drafts is an eight by eight board, so is so is chess actually. But um, but you have other games where the you know, like Batgammon, for instance, you know, that's a very distinct board. And a lot of ancient games are like this. This one was completely different from anything I'd seen, so I was a little bit skeptical about this identification. So I reached out to the curators. They said, yeah, come come and have a look at it. And so I was looking at the surface of the stone and I noticed that along one of the particular lines on the board, you could see that it had been worn smooth through use. This is something that you know I I'm primarily a prehistoric archaeologist, so I usually focus on the Bronze Age. So we tend to look a little bit more closely at objects because we have less uh written sources to deal with, so we have to like really look carefully at the objects to see how they might have been used. And so this stone was worn smooth in put in this one particular place around this one of the lines in particular, and it was about the width of a Roman gaming piece. So is if you were like sliding along that line many, many, many times, you're playing it a lot, you would wear down the the surface of the stone and make it smooth. So I said, okay, that okay, that might change my mind because I was leaning towards saying, no, this probably isn't a game. It's not anything like anything we'd seen.

SPEAKER_00 14:20 And what was this called? The um uh the actual stone on display?

SPEAKER_01 14:24 It was just object 04433 or whatever the number was. Yeah, it was it was just it didn't have a real name, it was just a game board from from the area. So yeah, so this the bathroom where the museum was built was part of a Roman town called Coriovalum, that, like you said, was around during the Roman Empire through the late Roman uh period. And this the stone was probably found. We tried to find if there were any kind of records for where it was found specifically, but it seems to have been brought to the museum by somebody who just kind of dug it up as they were um building something. In probably judging by the the way that it was recorded in the museum's catalog, that was it was consistent with like late 19th, early 20th century recording practices, which is when the town was like really kind of booming and growing. So we did some 3D imaging of the object to kind of look more at the surface to see if there were other areas that where the smoothing could be seen that was was not visible to the naked eye, but then we could use the imaging to enhance that. And we could see that yeah, the the greatest area of smoothing was the one that you could that I could notice, but then there were other places uh where it was a little bit less pronounced, but you could still see that it was there, and it was all around where the lines were. There were there are certain places on the board where the lines aren't, they're too far away from for a Roman game piece to have touched them. That those parts, there was no smoothing in those areas whatsoever. We also looked at it with a microscope just to confirm that like the the surface of the stone looked like leveling was going on on the stone grains, and I looked there and it did. So then, okay, so it looks like it could have been used for a game based on the way that this object was used. Because it was a unique object, it was not obvious what kind of game this might be. So what we did was we looked to the ethnographic and historical evidence. And we had been, as part of the project I was working on, we had compiled a database of uh over a thousand historical and traditional and ancient board games and what we knew about the rules for them. And so we looked to that database, kind of drew, uh filtered it for games that were on small boards with like around 25 or less uh places where you can play, looked for those that were around Europe. And we found a suite of different kinds of games that were, you know, some of them were the kind of tic-tac-toe board where you get three in a row, well, a little bit more complicated versions of that. But also there were a bunch that had this uh kind of goal where your the point of the game is to block your opponent from being able to win. So one person has more pieces than the other, the person with more pieces has to block the person with fewer pieces. And we found evidence for this in Scandinavia mostly, but also some in Greece and Italy for actual like documentation of the rules for these, but then there's archaeological evidence going back even into the Viking period for um boards that look like those games. So we said, okay, so we took uh all the different possible rules for these different games and adapted them to the board because the geometry is different, of course, so things will have to be changed. There's also some like uncertainty about where the lines actually are supposed to line up on this board. Um, it's a little bit sloppily made, which board games are often. And um, yeah, so we put all these different uh rules on the board from those that we had from the historical and ethnographic sources with different piece types, different winning conditions uh on the different boards. We ended up with 130 different possible rules, and then we had two AI agents play against play the games according to those rules against each other a thousand times for each different rules combination. So in total, 130,000 uh games. Um, as they were playing, we had them track where the pieces were moving, so as they moved along the different lines, because we did see in the the evidence on the actual stone is that one of the lines was used way more than the other. So we wanted to find rules that would replicate that. We ran all of the AI simulations, then we uh kind of filtered through the results and eliminated the ones that didn't fit. You know, we first we selected for the ones that had this one diagonal uh that was used more than it like twice the mean is what we picked, but more than it uh more than it would be expected. And then we kind of filtered out, you know, some of them other some of the rules had certain lines used that were also quite a bit used, but we didn't see evidence for that on the stone, so we eliminated them. And through this process of elimination, we were able to narrow it down to nine different types, uh, nine different rules that were consistent with what we see on this stone, and they were all this kind of blocky game. Uh, so that's what we think is most likely uh that this game that this board would have used been used for for playing this kind of blocky game.

SPEAKER_00 19:45 It's an incredible process, and to me it sounds like such a deep, rich process for you as a researcher to go through. How long does a process like that take?

SPEAKER_01 19:56 Well, I mean, it it took a lot of thinking because it's not something that had ever really been done before, right? Um, and I was working at the time with uh with a bunch of computer scientists who were we were we were actually trying to find ways to uh use AI to study uh games. But we were we were kind of looking in a different uh direction on that. We were looking at kind of using procedural methods to reconstruct games. Uh but this was a little bit different. This was a very kind of focused uh research question. Some of the challenge as an archaeologist is also having the conversation with the computer scientists because we speak very different languages, and they have a lot of ideas for what they can uh what the AI can do, and I you know I have different opinions on how that actually reflects on the archaeological evidence, and vice versa. I have like, oh, well, can't you just do this and it will just calculate everything? Well, not really. So it was a long process to kind of figure out okay, what do we need to do? How do we make these results actually reflect something and not that we're just kind of shoehorning rules into this board uh to make it work? Yeah, it was it was a challenge, but it was but it was cool in the end.

SPEAKER_00 21:13 Yeah, I'm actually in the process of of designing a board game for my five-year-old because um I well I really wanted something to play with her which was enjoyable for me as well and not purely luck-based. Um and I've been play testing it and maybe we've done 50, 60 playtests. Here you're saying that uh this AI or the two AIs sort of fighting up against each other were able to do what did you say, uh 130 uh a thousand for each game, so 130,000, yeah. 130,000 playtests, which you know you would not be able to do um in your in your career. Um so it's quite an it's it's amazing what AI's allowing you to do. Um would you do you think without it you would have been able to figure out what the likely rule set of this game was, or do you think that would have been almost impossible?

SPEAKER_01 22:01 I mean we could have done it and we could have gotten some results. We could have tried to get as many people to try to play this, to play the game and track each time they make a move where they move it. Like it's very time consuming. So we could have done it, we probably wouldn't have done it with so many different rule sets, we probably wouldn't have had quite as big a sample size, and then it it's not quite as convincing, I think, in that in that way, right? On the other side, you know, AIs don't play like humans do. So they they play to win at all costs, or at the very least, to not lose. So it can be challenging to use AI simulation in this way. For a small game like this, though, it seems like the AIs do kind of play like a person because the the method that we use is it kind of looks forward into the the possible moves ahead and then chooses the best one. Which for a small game where there are not a lot of choices. And not a lot of options for where you can move. That's kind of how humans play as well. So we don't think it's too far away for a very simple game like this. But that can be a challenge for you know for more complex games, let's say.

SPEAKER_00 23:13 I love the idea of sort of going back in time and telling somebody from the Roman Empire that their game had been cr had been played by two machines around this unbelievable sort of scope of history where we've suddenly been able to do this and an ancient person might be completely bewildered by that fact. Have you played it yourself?

SPEAKER_01 23:34 Yeah, I well, yeah, because I have tested it out and tested it out with students as well. Just because, you know, okay, the the AI could have produced these results, but okay, but is it actually a playable game? Is a different question. And yeah, I mean it works. It's you know, it's not the most exciting game to ever be played, but you know, um it doesn't have to be. People still play tic-tac-toe, um, and we all know that's not the most exciting game either.

SPEAKER_00 24:02 So do you do you spend a lot of time um playing ancient board games then? Or uh you know, um not just for work, but do you have you ever landed on anywhere where you've thought, actually, this is really fun, I'd love to play it again with friends.

SPEAKER_01 24:13 I mean, I do end up playing it a lot with friends because uh because they want to learn and they're like, oh, they're like, oh, let's do it. And and I also do like a lot of events at like museums and stuff where they'll they we you know we have people come and and play. So I do end up playing and showing people a lot um how to play these games. And yeah, I mean, it's surprising how the the kind of longevity some of them have. The Royal Game of War, especially, you you might have seen that on YouTube. Um we know we have a fairly good idea of how that game was played. Um tell me all tell me all about it. So I mean the Royal Game of War, it's comes from uh the ancient city of Ur, which is in Iraq. It's from ancient Sumer, so it's it's uh one of the older games. Um it's about two and a half thousand four and a half thousand years old. Several examples of it were found during excavations at the royal tombs there in the 20s and 30s, so that's why we call it the Royal Game of War, because it came from the Royal Tombs there. And we have a text uh from much after that that has some information about the rules, and you can kind of draw a line back to that from other things, uh other examples in ethnography that can give you a good estimation of how this game was played. And so, and there's like there are like YouTube videos of uh the it was um Irving Finkel, who was a curator at the British Museum, who found a tablet that was in the British Museum that had these rules, or at least the parts of the rules that were able to uh help us learn how to play them. So, so a lot of people have seen that, and like it's it's very it's kind of it's really evocative of the point that games in the the like simple form have not really changed so much in all these thousands of years, and it still can like it's you know the the rules are very abstract. Maybe they weren't to ancient Sumerians, maybe they had specific meanings, but in their in the way that they play, there are so there are lots of games that are very kind of similar to this, even today. So have you got a favorite ancient board game that you've played? I mean, that one's probably the the most fun to play. My favorite ancient game is the Egyptian game Senate, which is the one that I've done a lot of research on. But I don't know, the the the rules that we that we've tried to reconstruct it with, it it leaves a little bit to be desired, so I think we're missing something. Um, but I don't know what that is yet. But yeah, I think the royal game of the of or is um or actually it's so it changes its geometry, or people change the geometry of the board at a certain point in time. Um and we call that the game of 20 squares because we don't know the ancient name of it, and it has 20 squares.

SPEAKER_00 27:04 Um very imaginative.

SPEAKER_01 27:07 Really, really creative, right? But that one is a little bit has a little bit more drama than the Royal Game of War. It lasts a little bit longer, and um the part of the board where both players are playing is a bit more it's a bit longer, so there's more player interaction than that one. So I think that one's actually the better of the ancient games.

SPEAKER_00 27:24 Well, tell me about Senate, because as you mentioned, you've researched this a lot, and it was found actually sort of throughout ancient Egypt, right? It was quite common as a board game.

SPEAKER_01 27:33 Yeah, Senate is one of the the longest uh lasting games of human history. So it was played for at least 3,000 years in ancient Egypt. It's a game that at least at a certain point in time uh had a certain kind of religious uh connotation to it. So it has 30 squares that are in arranged in three rows of ten. Each square represents a portion of the journey uh from the point of death into the actual afterlife. So there are certain uh in the Egyptian cosmology, there are certain challenges and things that you have to pass through in order to actually get to the afterlife after you die. At least at a certain point in time in Egyptian history, the game is supposed to, it seems to have meant to represent that because we have texts that talk about this journey, and there are a couple of boards that have markings in each square, and it's and each square is one of the stages in this journey, so it's very kind of clear. But it was a game that was played by everybody in Egypt, and uh there were, for example, four four Senate game boxes were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Uh we also find it in graffiti, on monuments, and in the workers' village of the people who uh built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Uh they had all of these limestone chips left over from digging out these tombs, and some of them have this uh have uh games uh drawn on them. So we know that it was played by all kinds of different people in ancient Egypt all through time. It also spread outside of Egypt to the east coast of the Mediterranean and to Cyprus and down into Nubia as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:21 And is that unusual, would you say, in terms of ancient board games, that such a vast portion of society would have played? Because you mentioned this sort of 6,000-year-old game and it was um buried with a with a rich woman and you know, people who had the time to sit down and play games and the luxury of of leisure time. So is Senate a bit unusual in that respect?

SPEAKER_01 29:44 I don't know that it was unusual. So I think it's hard to know much about the game that uh that that rich woman uh was playing 6,000 years ago because it's it's the only one that we have. I would presume that other people were also playing it and just like digging holes in the sand. But like she was special because she made she had like the set uh made for her. And this is what you see. This is like, you know, Tutukamen has his four very fancy. He has like this big ivory and ebony table that's on this big stand in his tomb, but then everybody else is just playing on the ground, right? He got the collector's edition. Yeah, exactly. He had he had the connections to get a special it's specially made. It is an interesting question though, of like, do people play by the same rules and does the is the meaning always the same across all of these different social classes? Because if you have at the same time when Tutankhamun had had Senate in his tomb, this was the time period when it had the very close connection to uh the journey from death to the afterlife. So is the way that you play that game, that you play Senate, uh really reflective of that journey? And it does that meaning translate always into ever the the way that everybody plays it? I don't know, and we probably never will actually know that, but you know, there are some indications that some of some of the markings on some of the board, the fancier boards, are a little bit more strongly reflecting this religious tradition. Some of the more simple ones have no markings whatsoever, or they're very they're just like X's or something. So it's the connection and the iconography isn't really there, so it's hard to say, really.

SPEAKER_00 31:32 Amazing, yeah. Um and I mentioned before about my my daughter's board game. Um I made it because you know, just pure luck-based games are a bit boring for an adult. Uh they seem to be quite prevalent in children's games. And it made me wonder actually whether ancient games were more luck-based, more or skill-based, or whether whether it was a sort of combination like we would see in the modern day. Do you get a sense of that?

SPEAKER_01 31:59 From what we can tell, it seems to be that a lot of the most ancient games uh have some sort of dice involved with them. So there is an element of chance or luck. But I don't think they do not seem to be um pure luck, uh, where you just throw the dice and move like snakes and ladders or something like that. Most of them have you know multiple different pieces for each player, so you roll the dice, but then you have to also make a choice. And so there is an element of strategy that is involved in these games. It's like like Back Emmin, for instance, like there's a considerable amount of luck, but you also have to know how to use that luck appropriately in order to be able to win. Uh, we don't see, or at least it's not very obvious to us, that there are games where there is just strategy, you know, like games like chess or checkers or things like that. You start to see that uh in ancient Greece, they have some games that we know had no dice and were like that. Um, and then of course you start to see go in China and East Asia and chess shortly after that. It could be that these games also existed in earlier times, but they were not as popular. My kind of interpretation of that is sometimes these games that are only strategy-based can be tedious for people. Not everybody wants to be to be able to be good at those games, you have to like really practice at it. And yeah, you like chess, like if you play chess against someone who knows how to play chess, it's not very fun, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:33 No.

SPEAKER_01 33:35 So games that have the chance element make them more exciting because anybody can win. Even if you are really good at backgammon or the royal game of war, you still might have bad luck and lose. So I think chance as sort of this leveling mechanism or the dice uh as this leveling mechanism in games, I think has a lot to do with the their sociability and why they are popular at this time.

SPEAKER_00 34:03 Uh yeah, I wondered whether there was any connection. You mentioned that there was potentially this sort of religious spiritual connection to um Senate, but whether the element of luck ever played into ancient ideas of like fate and fortune, whether you see any of that in like the texts that have been recovered.

SPEAKER_01 34:22 There has been a lot of kind of suggestion that uh board games are a form in the past were a form of divination, which I think is a little bit overplayed. As archaeologists, we want to find things or the the tradition of archaeology has been that we want to say find important things to say, and so religion is one of these important things that we want to say something about. But I don't think everything has to be like that. I think people I think there are some indications in some places at certain points in time that there may have been use of games for divination. So we see, for instance, the game of 20 squares that I mentioned. In a couple of places in, or at least in one place in Lebanon, the game is on this object that looks that is shaped like a liver. And um we know that they were using hepatoscopy or like liver divination. They would take the liver of a sheep, I believe, and look for imperfections or whatever in it to then say something about whatever the question was being asked. And it has twenty different sectors that you have to kind of check and interpret, um, the same as the game. So there's this one object from the from this one place that has this kind of pretty evocative connection between the two. Um, but I don't think the game always has this, right? At least not in this formal kind of connection between fate and uh the future and being able to tell it. Now, on a more kind of casual, you know, believing in you know superstition and luck and chance and fate, you see that all across all kinds of games everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 36:05 And I'm I'm quite fascinated to hear, you know, dice have been used as part of these games for well as long as pretty much as long as we can go back and and see them and find them. Um and I wondered, well, one, why are dice so enduring? Uh, you know, we we got evidence of sort of ancient bone dice, even, haven't we, from archaeological uh past? And then also, you know, what other game pieces would have been used and and perhaps have sort of survived into the modern day that we see now?

SPEAKER_01 36:36 Yeah, I mean dice are various forms of dice, because it's not just your typical cubic sided uh dice, which are they are very old, they go back uh at least five thousand years for cubic dice, but you can use anything that has two distinguishable sides as a form of dice. Um cowry shells, for instance, are commonly used across cultures um because they have the mouth and the round side, and you take four or five of them and throw them, uh then you you get a value from throwing that, right? You can even have sticks or reeds that are split in half uh the long way, and you can throw them that way. And yeah, the bone dyes that you were uh alluding to, I think, are the knuckle bones, which are um specifically the talus bones of usually sheep or goat, um, that have they basically function as a D4. They have four uh distinct sides that you can throw them. They're used for lots and lots of different things. There's a lot of different kinds of uh uses for those things, but in ancient West Asia we know for sure they were used especially for the game of 20 squares that I mentioned. They were found, some of the ones that were in Tutankhamun's tomb had them in the drawer. So um and people were also interestingly making artificial versions of those bones out of things like ivory and glass or metal.

SPEAKER_00 37:59 Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 37:59 Yeah, that's an interesting little uh thing that people did. Because the form of it also had some kind of meaning. You could you could just make a little kind of rectangle and mark it with numbers, but that then it loses the meaning that it had. So, yeah, dice are one thing. Um and then for most games, uh it seems like up until chess really evolved uh and came about around the middle of the first millennium uh AD uh in India. Most games involved players having pieces that were of one type per player. So you could have multiple, like for instance, Senate uh had seven pieces per player, but they were all each player had you know all of the same pieces. They weren't distinct from one another, they seem to have had the same kind of properties. And there's you know, they're cones, you would you would recognize these as some of them are you know these kind of like conical shapes with a little knob on top. That's like the basic shape of a of a game piece nowadays, and like that goes back to the earliest games. So yeah, some of some of these things are really enduring.

SPEAKER_00 39:09 Yeah, it's amazing that we really we we sort of stumbled upon this almost the perfect formula and we decided, well, we'll just stick with that for the rest of um time now. The dice work, yeah. Uh these cone-shaped things work, yeah. Let's just keep those forever. Um why boards in particular? Because, you know, I I I sort of think that even post-agriculture, when we start to see these emerge, when people were a bit more settled, still the day wasn't like we have now, where we've just got sort of quite a lot of leisure time, we've got quite a lot of time just sitting in our living room, able to sit down and play. You know, it sort of 6,000 years ago we would have been much more active, uh, the need to work the field or whatever it was would have been much greater. So it seems almost antithetical to think that we would have gravitated towards this this board, this still board where we have to sit for a long time and strategize and think. And I I don't know, yeah, is have you got any theories on why boards became this so culturally important thing?

SPEAKER_01 40:10 It's hard to say for sure, right? Obviously. But I I have some ideas. So first thing is that I think that hunting hunting and gathering people actually had more free time than we think they did. And you have people have studied and done ethnographic work on today's ethnic um hunter-gatherer people, and they do have a fair amount of free time. It sh it differs between different societies and what environments they're living in, and etc. But some some of them even um have suggested that they have more free time um in some places than we did. Yeah, I've heard that actually. Yeah, yeah. So um I think that has part to do with it. I think another thing that has for for boards specifically, I think over the past kind of 150 years, it board games it's just this has changed recently, but there has been sort of an infantilization of board games in that they are something for kids to do, right? And this is why there are so many simple, uh simple and boring ones. But um there was a period in like the the 20th century, especially that like board games were like work for kids, they're supposed to like learn something from it. But if you look at traditional games cross-culturally, it's not true everywhere, but pretty a pretty common thread that you see is that it's something that older people play. Not not just like adults, but like also like older adults. So I think part of that and has to do, yes, we were m a lot more active uh as hunter-gatherers, but as you get older, you may not want to be quite as active all the time, right? But you still want to be social in some way and play and enjoy your time in in whatever way you can. And so it keeps your mind active, it keeps you social um by you know having this interaction with other people. I think for me, that's kind of where I see it coming about.

SPEAKER_00 42:12 Um, of course, none of this can be proven, but no, no, but you've got a pretty good educated guess given the f uh the field in which you uh study. But I think it makes sense, yeah. Yeah, it does, yeah. It's it's logical to me. Um so I I do want to discuss a few other ancient board games of interest. There's this game Hounds and Jackals.

SPEAKER_01 42:33 Yeah, so Hounds and Jackals is another one of these where we don't know the actual name of it. Um we call it Hounds and Jackals now because one of the first uh first ones that was found uh was actually found by Howard Carter, the guy who is more famous for discovering Tutankhamun's tomb. Um he keeps coming up. But um he found this board that's now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that had five pieces per player. One player was jackals and one was hounds. We don't actually know the ancient name of that one either. You also will see that called 58 holes sometimes because it usually has 58 holes. This is a game that I uh have done a little bit of research on before. Um it seems to have been a game that appears around 4,000 years ago, and it interestingly kind of appears everywhere in Egypt and like West Asia. Um I had done specific research in Azerbaijan, uh where uh the nomadic peoples that were living there, so they were probably cattle herders, had some examples of this game. Uh so it was interesting that they were playing this game, that the herders, cow herders in Azerbaijan were playing the same games that pharaohs in Egypt were playing at this specific time period, uh, which was really cool. You can imagine Tutankhamun doing sort of a viral Kickstarter, and that's why it suddenly appears across the but it's interesting, it has been kind of in the literature that it originated in Egypt because it had the ones that were possibly the earliest came from Egypt, but re-looking at the evidence, it seems to be more like the Mesopotamia, Turkey area, uh, where the strongest evidence for this game's origins comes from. But it was particularly popular at that very early period, and then it did continue on for another 2,000 years, specifically in Mesopotamia, but it it kind of disappeared from Egypt after about 500 years or so.

SPEAKER_00 44:42 Getting bound to get bored uh bored of the board game eventually, right? Yeah, I mean things after a few thousand years. Yeah, after a few thousand years.

SPEAKER_01 44:48 It seems to be I think that there uh it seems to be the case that there are particular games that are particularly tied to certain economic systems at certain periods. Of time. Monopoly. Yeah, so uh and as those systems, you know, because as I mentioned before, they are ways of they're social lubricants, they help people to interact with one another. So if you go somewhere far away and you want to have an economic interaction with that person, you can play a game with them. You don't necessarily even have to speak their language to be able to communicate how to play it. And you can tell things about how people operate by how they play a game, right? Are they playing fairly? Are they trying to cheat? Are they bragging? All this kind of stuff. So uh you can initiate an economic interaction in that way that then has consequences afterwards. And so games can spread along these economic systems um in this way, and then when it collapses, they kind of seem to go back to their where they were locally popular before that.

SPEAKER_00 45:54 I wonder if um a game like Monopoly will eventually disappear if we ever move to sort of like a post-capitalist society or something different, some other you could because no economic uh model really lasts forever, does it? So that will at one point in history something will change. And I wonder if Monopoly will fall by the wayside, because we used to think that as like a staple of board games in the modern age, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 46:17 Yeah, I mean it is it is in a way our traditional board game nowadays, because everybody knows it. Nobody actually reads the rules. Um you just learn it at some point growing up. And maybe, but maybe it will continue after because the the origins of Monopoly are as a critique of capitalism, actually, and then it was kind of then co-opted and kind of did a complete 180. Um I'm sure that you know if capitalist systems collapse, there will be different different kinds of board games that have different kinds of values, and well the the distribution will be different too, because our the way that we uh get and encounter new games is so tied up in capitalism, right? So yeah, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 47:03 And and uh I recently saw an article about the face dust disc, uh which is this ancient clay disc from Bronze Age Crete. And the article sort of went into how uh although originally thought to be an example of archaic writing, this article was suggesting it might be, in fact, an ancient board game. So this uh the face dust disc is sort of roughly 16 centimetres inside in size, covered with um 241 stamped spiraling pictographic signs. So you could see where this assumption could have been made. Uh have you got a take on the face dust disc? Have you discovered have you looked into it?

SPEAKER_01 47:41 I the face dust disc plagues me. I it's um it's a weird artifact. And in some ways, it's like the one that we did this the AI study with here in the Netherlands because it is a unique object. It's something that nothing else exists like it. It's this disc that has these signs that are not found on anything else. No other disc like this exists, so it's a really weird thing. And I have seen it, it has been suggested many times over since it was found about 120 or so years ago, um, that it's a game. But it doesn't quite fit in with uh what I would expect a game to look like. So we have other games that we do know existed from uh Bronze Age Crete. Uh they are circles, they they're rendered as circles of holes of either 10 or 12 in number, um, and also there are some that are grids of varying numbers of uh of holes, and they're on pavements at the the palaces in Bronze Age Crete, so in public places, things that look like where games would be played that we can tell ethnographically and historically. This object, the fist the Festos disc, is it doesn't show like we use U-Swear to look at this unique object. So we said, okay, this thing has a unique pattern on it. Let's try to look at it to see if there's any indication of how it was used. And so that's how we made the step from okay, this is a weird object, to okay, it actually could have been used in this way because the object itself is telling us this. There is n I mean the the festo sysca's been studied to death. Nobody there's no sign that it was used in anything. So for any kind of play, you have to have the interaction of the the pieces on the surface of the board. And it doesn't look like that kind of thing was happening on this object. It does have a spiral, and we do know of the Egyptian game Mehen, which is in the form of a coiled serpent. But it's very different from that because on the Egyptian game you just have a bunch of different squares that are in s in a spiral. In this one you have the in the Festos disc you have the each individual sign, that's something sometimes the different signs repeat throughout the spiral, they're broken up into sections. It's something that's really quite different. And another thing that you can that you always have to be careful of is that you can make almost anything into a game. So if it's a geometric pattern, you can make a game out of it. That doesn't necessarily mean that it was used as a game in the past. There's a lot of speculation uh around what the Vestosis could have been. There's even speculation of whether it's whether it's even genuine. So I am not convinced.

SPEAKER_00 50:49 Well, nearby uh Crete is Cyprus, right? And Cyprus was uh a hotbed for board game activity, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 50:56 Yeah, yeah. So that's that's actually where I got my start uh researching board games, was um in Cyprus. So I don't think they were particularly stronger or more active gamers than anywhere else. They just for some reason in ancient Cyprus in Bronze Age Cyprus, so from about two and a half thousand BC until uh one thousand, they were making games out of stone. So they were very simple games, it's just like blocks of limestone, very rough, barely shaped if at all, with series of holes in them. And there are hundreds and hundreds of them. There's almost five hundred um as of the last count. Probably just because it was locally available, this is the stuff they were building their houses out of, also, so they probably it's just lying around, and it's really nice to make a board game and play on there. It's really cool because it allows us to so yeah, like I was saying, like usually you would people would just make stuff uh out of games out of things that would never survive. Even if they do make game objects, they're often uh wooden or would have been made out of wood, uh, which won't survive in all climates archaeologically. So the fact that they're making them out of stone in Cyprus helps us to see them. It and um really indicates because you have uh you know they're not living in very big cities on the island at this period of time. They're really small villages. You know, every house seems to have a board game in it. So it's really striking to me like the the connection that you know this is something that people were doing in their everyday lives, even in these like small village societies on the island.

SPEAKER_00 52:36 And and that they cared so deeply about it um is amazing. Everyone had a board or board game cupboard even through antiquity. I love it. Yeah, yeah. Has there any uh any attempts to sort of recreate and commercialize any of these old games? Uh for sure. Or is that not really a thing? Oh, there has.

SPEAKER_01 52:52 Oh, for sure, yeah. Yeah, the the Royal Game of War is uh is a big one. The um I mean you can buy it from the the British the because the British Museum has uh a board for it, like an actual board, and um, you know, they sell it in the gift shop. And you can find all kinds of places online. I had a the Senate board that I that I have, which is obviously not a real one, but um, I was actually given that as a teenager, uh, which is funny because I had never even like ancient games weren't even like on my radar at that point. Um but then I started and I was like, wait a minute, I have that somewhere. Yeah, so yeah, you can you can buy many of them online, send it the Royal Game of War, some of the ancient Roman and Greek games as well.

SPEAKER_00 53:38 And so when do we see this sort of move to what we would consider now to be more of a modern type of board game? The likes of Monopoly, you know, not carved into a rock. When when does that emerge? Is it been most of human history where that rocks have been sort of the primary uh uh material that we've used?

SPEAKER_01 53:56 Well, I don't think I don't think I don't think stone is the ever the primary material. I think it's usually like just like on the ground somewhere is has been the typical material. I think you can see this process in different stages, and it's really just a question of like where you want to draw the line. So one point is that woman's tomb in Egypt when she's you have something that's made specifically for playing a game. That's one point. Then you have another point in the Middle Ages, I would say, uh, where you have the game of the goose, which uh comes about. Um I don't know if you know that one. It's something that so it's another one of these boring chance games. But uh it it starts in Italy uh with the advent of the printing press. So it's just like it's a spiral uh thing where each player has one piece, you throw the dice and you move, and then sometimes you have to go back, sometimes you go forward, sometimes you miss a turn. It's like the this basic kind of game. There's no choice whatsoever in there, so there's no strategy. But what's important about it is that they're printed for the first time in Europe at least, and they're printed with the rules on them. So that's another major point in time where you get, okay, now you can have a game that uh you can sell, and you don't have to like teach somebody to it because the rules are there. Um and they get like different versions of it, they start to get different themes. So, you know, during colonial period, it's about traveling the world, and like at the center of the of the game is France or something, communicating certain kinds of ideologies there. Um, and you get a wide variety of different themes in this game because it's easy to make that from printing it, and uh you can really represent it on paper better than like traditional games, where there might be a theme that it's more kind of abstract, and you really have to kind of imagine it, whereas you start to really see it um as part of the game itself. And then kind of I guess the the third part point that I would say is another point where you could say it starts is in beginning around the Industrial Revolution. Um and this is the point in time where you are really starting to get conspicuous leisure becoming a real thing and also uh commercialization of games. So uh you have people who are trying to create new games in order to sell them to new markets. Uh, you're getting people who have time to play games, so the market is being created. Then you get this kind of snowball effect where uh so in order to sell a new game, you have to create a new game and you have to create new rules that haven't been invented before, and so you get like this increase of complexity. Um, and then that it continues to now where we have some like really, really complex games, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:57 Yeah, like um my co-host uh Matt, he he recently uh I think he had to read in on the rules for about two days for this game Twilight Imperium. Um, and Twilight Imperium takes uh 12 or more hours, uh especially if you've got new players to complete. Yeah, and you just can't imagine in the ancient world, one, that they would want to spend 12 or more hours playing, and two, that the complexity would have been um even needed because there's this financial incentive. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 57:25 Like, yeah, I've been playing this game with my friends here, I think it's called Oath, I don't even remember, but like you play it through once and then you like have to put it away in a certain way, and then the next time you play, it's kind of like it's kind of like modeling a society that goes through like many ages. So like it's so complex. Traditional games, you have to memorize the rules because it's not written down. So like you don't get complex rules like this before then.

SPEAKER_00 57:52 What I find amazing is that board games have endured despite video games being available, uh despite you know AI being able to play board games and also solve board games, you know. Despite all of this, we still love board games, we cherish them. We even saw Alpha Go, the AI designed to be the best Go player in the world, beat the world champion Lisa Dole a few years ago. And AI is only getting better, right? So how do you feel knowing that AI can now just solve board games and beat world champions?

SPEAKER_01 58:27 It's no big deal to me. I mean, for me, the point isn't to for humans to be able to win, or the point of the game isn't being able to win or be the best at it. I know that this is definitely the motivation for some people, right? But the fundamental thing about the game, board games for me, is the social aspect of them. And so you're doing something with a group of people, it may maybe even just two people, and you're sharing this time together and you're doing something together, and uh that's the important part for me. And I think even I think there is still value of being the best human that can do it. So so we know so much that machines can do so many things that are so much that are they're more capable of doing so many things than humans are. So what? Um people still, you know, you have machines that can lift giant things, but you still have weightlifters. True. It's whatever machines can do so many cool things and so many big things, but it's also in a certain way you can kind of be poetic about it and be like, you know, still being the best human to be able to do something, there still is value in that, I think.

SPEAKER_00 59:40 Yeah, I totally agree with you. And and I think, you know, um going back to making this game with my daughter, I it kind of with everything you've laid out here, it makes me feel quite connected to our ancestors, to this urge to invent games, and it was something clearly that they've been doing for thousands of years and that they really wanted to do. And and so I wonder if to you, as an expert in this area, whether you think board games reveals something deeply human about us and and something that's been true for thousands of years that that lasts to the modern age.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:14 Well, yeah, I mean I think it is this kind of desire for connection and shared experience. Because even though it is something that is sort of contrived, it's something that you do with somebody else, and you that you have you build connections with people through doing that, and I think that is the most human thing. And also on a certain level, like this the the act of doing this in a board game is one of the things that has endured and has not really changed so much. It has really stayed the same the most of in comparison to other things that humans do. We still, you know, you see an ancient board game on a table and it has the board and the pieces, and like you know what you're supposed to do with it. You may not know the exact rules, but like you know, you know what's gonna happen. You're gonna move them through the spaces or whatever. It fundamentally has not changed in at least 5,000 years. Um, and I think that's really cool, and it really can help people to connect with uh the past. And it's a thing like, yeah, you could learn how to make clothes like ancient people did, or build houses like them, or make pottery, or cook food, or whatever, but it takes a lot of effort to do that kind of stuff. Uh you could do it. But uh playing a game, it's very simple. It you don't have to learn a lot of new skills to do it. It's it's the same thing now as it was back then. So I think that's really cool about it, too.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:42 Uh yeah, that is really cool. Well, Walter Christ, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Really, really fascinating diving into the history of board games. Thank you for joining what we did before. Absolutely. I was happy to do it. Um, I hope you enjoy it. What a legend. A huge thank you to Walter Christ. And I'd love to know, have you ever played any ancient board games like Senate? Let me know wherever you're listening. Now, in a few days, I'm releasing something special on the YouTube channel, a deep dive into that Roman board game, Walter Help to Decode, where I'll actually show you how it works using my own recreated version of the board. So if you want to see this ancient game brought back to life, make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube. And as always, if you've enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. It makes a huge difference. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before. See you next time.