A History Of Board Games Other Than Chess

The Board Game Landscape Beyond The Royal Game

Chess gets all the press. It shows up in movies, it's the default answer when someone asks what "a board game" is, and it has more Wikipedia pages than most countries. But if you actually look at the history of board games other than chess, you find something much messier and more interesting. Board gaming predates chess by millennia, and the games that survived usually survived for completely different reasons than the royal game did. The earliest known board game is Senet from ancient Egypt, dating to around 3100 BCE. It was a race game where pieces moved along a grid of thirty squares based on casting sticks or knucklebones. The point wasn't tactical depth the way chess developed later. The point was religious. Playing Senet was a simulation of the journey through the afterlife, and the quality of the tomb paintings showing people playing it tells you how seriously they took it. Dead pharaohs were buried with Senet boards. That's not a hobbyist thing. That's a civilization-level obsession. Then there's The Royal Game of Ur, also around 2600 BCE, dug out of Mesopotamia. It's a race game too, but with a completely different structure — two boards joined together to make a longer track, dice invented from four-faced tetrahedral dice. The British Museum has the actual board. I played a replica once at a museum workshop and the first thing you notice is how fast a game goes. Twenty minutes max. It's not even close to the three-hour commitment a serious chess match requires. That speed matters for why these older games survived in certain cultures and not others. Fast games get played repeatedly. Slow games need a different social context.

Gaming at the Go board in ancient China around 2000 BCE is a different category entirely. Go came out of the same philosophical tradition that produced Confucianism and Taoism, and the rules are almost absurdly simple. Two players place stones on a grid. Surround territory. That's it. But the emergent complexity is what makes it a serious game. A standard Go board has 361 intersections, and the number of possible legal board positions exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. You don't calculate your way through Go the way you calculate through chess. You develop a feel for shape and balance. I spent about two years learning Go and the moment it clicked for me was realizing I'd been trying to play it like chess the whole time. That's a pretty common beginner mistake. The opening theory is completely different. In chess you develop pieces toward the center. In Go the opening, called fuseki, is about framework and flexibility. You're building territory, not attacking anything. Mancala is another category that doesn't fit the chess model at all. It's a family of sowing games found across Africa and Asia, with some versions dating back to the sixth century CE and possibly older. The mechanic is simple: you pick up seeds from one pit and distribute them counter-clockwise into subsequent pits, picking up seeds from certain configurations to continue sowing. What makes it interesting is the state space. A typical Kalah board has 14 pits and 48 seeds. The branching factor is somewhere in the hundreds per turn. But Mancala isn't played for deep strategy. It's played for speed and counting. My grandmother played a version called Oware with her friends every Sunday morning. She could calculate four or five moves ahead without thinking about it. That's pattern recognition built through repetition, not analytical calculation. Different cognitive skill entirely. Backgammon occupies a weird middle ground between race games and tactical games. It goes back to the game I found referenced in the Babylonian Talmud and the Roman Emperor Julian's own poem about it. The modern form with the pointing system was standardized in Persia around the sixth century CE. The real innovation was the introduction of dice and the doubling cube, which turned a pure luck-based race into a game of probability management. That doubling cube is what separates backgammon from basically every other ancient board game. It adds a meta-layer of betting and risk assessment. You're not just playing the board. You're playing the opponent's perception of your position. I've seen experienced players fold a clearly losing board because they were terrified of the doubling cube being taken. That's a psychological game happening underneath the mechanics.

What people often miss when they look at A History Of Board Games Other Than Chess is that most of these older games aren't competing on the same axis. Chess became dominant because it's a perfect information, zero-sum, abstract strategy game with no element of chance. That makes it ideal for formal analysis and for becoming "serious" in the way European intellectual culture valued. Games like Go share the perfect information requirement but add so much complexity that brute-force calculation becomes impossible. Games like backgammon and Mancala introduce chance and shift the focus toward probability and psychology. They're solving different problems. Comparing them directly to chess is like comparing a scalpel to a hammer and saying the scalpel is better because it's sharper. There's also the matter of cultural transmission. Chess traveled from India to Persia to the Islamic world to Europe and got adapted at each step. The rules changed, the pieces changed names, the cultural meaning shifted. A History Of Board Games Other Than Chess shows a similar pattern but with less centralization. Go stayed mostly in East Asia. Mancala stayed in Africa and South Asia. Backgammon bounced between the Middle East and Europe. None of these games went global the way chess did, and the reason is partly geography and partly the fact that chess was adopted by European nobility as a status symbol and then codified by printing presses and chess clubs. The older games didn't have that institutional support. One thing I noticed when I started researching this topic seriously was how many of these games were dismissed as "primitive" in older academic literature. Senet was called a children's game. Mancala was filed under "folk pastimes." This was clearly wrong and it's gotten better in the last thirty years of scholarship, but the baggage lingers. A game's age doesn't determine its depth. The depth comes from the rule set interacting with human cognition over centuries of play. Chess is deep because six centuries of Grandmasters have extracted its depth. Go is deep because five centuries of Japanese professionals did the same work. Senet is shallow in comparison, but that's a property of its design, not a reflection of its cultural value.

Why These Games Matter Now

The recent resurgence of board gaming has mostly centered on modern Eurogames and reprints of classics. You see backgammon tournaments and Go clubs popping up in cities. But the older games are still underserved. There are very few good digital implementations of Senet or The Royal Game of Ur. Mancala apps are mostly low-quality. If you want to actually learn these games rather than just read about them, you need to hunt for decent implementations, and most of what's available is either a bare-bones clone or a mobile ad-filled mess. I spent an afternoon trying to find a solid Go server that wasn't either a smartphone app with a clunky interface or a desktop program that required Java. The solution I ended up using was a browser-based client that runs on a specific domain I found through a Reddit thread. It loads instantly, supports ranked games, and has a decent lobby system. The downside is that the commentary feature is unreliable and the move history sometimes doesn't save between sessions. I work around it by taking screenshots after each game and saving the SGF files manually. It's not ideal but it's the best option I've found after trying half a dozen alternatives. The deeper issue is that most people's understanding of board game history starts and ends with chess. The narrative is always the same: chess evolved from an Indian game, became the preeminent mind sport of Europe, and everything else is a sideshow. But if you trace the actual timeline, chess is kind of a latecomer. It appeared around the sixth century CE, which is medieval by ancient standards. Most of the games I mentioned above predate it by a thousand years or more. They represent different design philosophies, different cultural contexts, and different approaches to what a game should be. Chess won the Western cultural marketplace. That doesn't make it the most interesting thing in the board game world.

Another thing worth noting is the material culture. The physical objects themselves tell a story that the rules don't. The Senet boards found in tombs vary in quality from crude scratchings on limestone to elaborate inlaid pieces made of ivory and ebony. The Royal Game of Ur used shells and bone. The go boards used by Japanese professionals are often handcrafted from rare woods and cost thousands of dollars. The Mancala boards range from carved wood to pits dug in the dirt. These materials matter because they tell you who was playing and how seriously. A game that's played on a dirt floor in a village is still a legitimate game. The simplicity of the equipment doesn't diminish the strategic depth, but it does mean you won't find detailed rule codifications for it in ancient texts the way you do for chess and Go. My recommendation if you want to actually engage with this history is to start with one game and learn it properly rather than skimming all of them. Pick the one that appeals to you based on the design philosophy. If you like deep calculation, Go. If you like psychology and risk management, backgammon. If you like speed and pattern recognition, Mancala. If you want something with historical atmosphere even if the strategic depth is limited, Senet or the Royal Game of Ur. Don't treat this like a checklist. Treat it like finding a craft that actually fits your brain. There's a genuine gap in the market for well-researched, well-designed implementations of these older games. Most existing products are either academically accurate but visually dated, or visually appealing but historically shallow. The ones that get both right are rare. When I play a digital version of an ancient game, I want to know the rules are accurate, the board layout matches the historical evidence, and the implementation doesn't add modern conveniences that fundamentally change how the game is played. I've had disagreements with people about rule variants for Senet because different scholars interpret the same tomb scenes differently. There's no single authoritative rule set for most of these games. That uncertainty is part of what makes studying them interesting, but it's also a practical problem if you're trying to build something usable.

The takeaway isn't that chess is bad or that these other games are better. They're just different. Chess is a product of a specific cultural moment and it optimized for a specific kind of play. The older games optimized for different things, and some of them survived longer and broader distribution than chess ever achieved on its home continent. Understanding that range of options changes how you think about what board games can do and what they're for.