A 4,500-year-old game with its rules found
The Royal Game of Ur was dug up in royal tombs at Ur, in what is now Iraq, in the 1920s. The BOARD is about 4,500 years old, a race game for two players with pieces moved by throwing four-sided dice. For decades nobody knew how it was played.
Then Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, read a clay tablet written around 177 BC by a Babylonian scribe that set out the rules. He worked out a playable version, and museum visitors now play the same game people were playing in Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Ancient Egyptians had their own race game, senet, and Tutankhamun was buried with several sets. Our ancient Mesopotamia page covers where Ur was.
Monopoly was meant to be a warning
In 1904 an American woman, Elizabeth Magie, patented The Landlord's Game, designed to show how landlords grow rich while tenants fall into poverty. She included two sets of rules: one where players shared the wealth, and one where the winner ruined everyone else. The ruinous version caught on.
Decades later Charles Darrow sold a version to the Parker Brothers company as MONOPOLY in 1935, and for years he was credited as its inventor. Magie was paid a few hundred dollars for her patent. The game she built to criticise money-grabbing became one of the best-selling board games ever made.
Scrabble scores came from a newspaper
An out-of-work architect, Alfred Butts, invented the game that became SCRABBLE in the 1930s. To decide how many tiles each letter should get and what it should score, he counted how often letters appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. Common letters like E got many tiles and one point; rare ones like Q and Z got a single tile and ten points.
CLUEDO was invented by Anthony Pratt, a musician in Birmingham, who is said to have designed it while sitting out air raids in the Second World War; it came out in 1949 and is called Clue in North America. JENGA, created by Leslie Scott, takes its name from a Swahili word meaning build.
A computer has solved draughts
DRAUGHTS, called CHECKERS in North America, is old — a version was being played in the south of France in the 1100s. In 2007 a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta announced that their computer program, combining deep searches with vast databases of endgame positions, had proved that if neither PLAYER makes a mistake, the game always ends in a draw. It took eighteen years of calculation.
Chess has far too many positions to solve the same way — more possible games than there are atoms in the observable universe, by a common estimate. The rest of the grid is the kit of game night: DICE, a PAWN, a TOKEN, a COUNTER, a SPINNER and CARDS, plus DOMINOES, BACKGAMMON, one of the oldest games still widely played, LUDO, adapted from the Indian game pachisi, RISK, SORRY, YAHTZEE, OTHELLO, BINGO, TRIVIA, and CHESS, which has a page of its own.