Play is a fundamental part of life. It’s not just people that play; many animals do too, and most of those play well into adulthood. It’s no great surprise, therefore, that we find evidence of that particular, peculiar practice of structured play that we call board games alongside the earliest human artifacts. Archeologists have unearthed 11,000-year-old slabs of limestone with parallel roles of pits or holes that they’ve tentatively suggested might be boards for a Mancala-like game. That’s about 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. And, of course, who knows how long before that people had been playing games with sticks or pebbles on boards scratched in the dust of their dwelling places?
We reach firmer ground when we come to the dawn of recorded civilization. Babylonians played the Royal Game of Ur. Egyptians played Senet. People all around the world played with knucklebones, cubic bones that were used as an early form of dice. One curious thing about many early games is that they seemed to serve some sort of fortune-telling or ritualistic function. Knucklebones were certainly used for divination, as was the Game of Ur, and while the rules of Senet are uncertain, it appears to have links with the Egyptian journey into the afterlife. At some point, however, these trappings were lost and people began to enjoy them solely for the strategy and excitement they provided. This leads us on a straight path to today's best board games.
