People have been rolling, racing and bluffing for thousands of years. These tiles visit the ancient boards of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, the inventors behind household classics, the long and tangled history of playing cards, and games that made headlines. Meet a barber who sold his house to launch Uno, a pianist who dreamed up Clue during wartime blackouts, a scholar who read game rules off a clay tablet, and a submarine crew that still passes along a lucky cribbage board.
Every tile in a Board and Card Games game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Classic Games
nine stories
1Monopoly sets that smuggled escape kits to prisoners
On the tile: MonopolyWorld War II
During World War II, British intelligence turned Monopoly into an escape kit. John Waddington Ltd. of Leeds, the first company to publish Monopoly in Britain, also knew how to print maps on silk, which held up far better than paper. Special sets hid silk maps, small compasses, metal files and real money tucked among the play money. Fake charities sent the rigged games to prisoner-of-war camps, and tiny marks on the board showed which region's maps were inside. The Waddingtons employees who made them were sworn to secrecy.
In 1964 toy inventor Reyn Guyer imagined a floor mat game where people were the playing pieces, as a promotion for Johnson Wax shoe polish. The company passed, but Guyer, Charles Foley and Neil Rabens kept refining the game they called Pretzel, and Milton Bradley released it as Twister in 1966. Some critics found it too risque, and stores such as Sears turned it down. Then on May 3, 1966, Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played it on The Tonight Show. By the following year, more than three million copies had been sold.
3A forgotten 1822 game upended a Parker Brothers boast
On the tile: U.S. Map Game1822
After acquiring The Mansion of Happiness in 1894, Parker Brothers promoted it as the first board game ever published in America. It was an English game first produced in the United States in 1843. In 1991 a game collector found an older rival in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society. The Travellers' Tour Through the United States, printed in 1822 by the New York mapmakers F. & R. Lockwood, is the earliest known board game printed in the U.S. Its hand-colored map showed 24 states and 139 towns and cities.
Long before plastic ships and pegs, games like Battleship were played with pencil and paper. Russian officers reportedly played one on a hand-drawn grid during World War I, and the Starex Novelty Company's 1931 game Salvo gave players printed grids for plotting their ships. Milton Bradley made its own pencil-and-paper version, Broadsides, in 1943 before launching the plastic Battleship in 1967, with a fold-up lid that hid each fleet. The original box showed a father and son playing while a mother and daughter washed dishes in the background.
5A computer proved that perfect checkers ends in a draw
On the tile: Checkers2007
The Chinook project at the University of Alberta began in 1989 with one goal: beat the human world checkers champion. The program won the World Man-Machine Championship in 1994, and Guinness later recognized it as the first program to win a human world championship. The team then aimed higher. With dozens of computers working around the clock for most of the years since 1989, they announced on April 29, 2007, that checkers is solved. If neither player ever makes a mistake, the game ends in a draw.
6A French Scrabble champion who does not speak French
On the tile: Nigel Richards2015
Nigel Richards, a New Zealander who had already won the English-language world Scrabble championship three times, took on a new challenge in 2015. Beginning in late May, he reportedly spent about nine weeks memorizing the French Scrabble dictionary. That July in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, he won the French-language world championship, beating a player from Gabon in the final. A friend explained that he did not speak French at all and had simply learned the words. The mostly French-speaking crowd gave him a standing ovation.
7Kasparov beat Deep Blue first, then lost the rematch
On the tile: Deep Blue1997
IBM's chess computer Deep Blue first faced world champion Garry Kasparov in February 1996 in Philadelphia. It won the opening game, the first victory by a computer over a reigning world champion under regular time controls, but Kasparov took the match 4 to 2. The team improved the machine, which could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and the rematch came in New York in May 1997. After a tense sixth game, Deep Blue won 3.5 to 2.5. The computer was later retired to the Smithsonian.
8The Game of the Goose went from royal gift to print shop
On the tile: Game of Goose1500s
The Game of the Goose is a pure race of luck around a spiral of 63 numbered spaces, dotted with geese and special spaces such as the Bridge and Death. A famous early mention comes from between 1574 and 1587, when Francesco de' Medici sent a Gioco dell'Oca to Philip II of Spain. By 1597 John Wolfe had registered it in England. Game historians call it the first board game to be produced commercially, and many boards printed today keep the same basic layout used centuries ago.
9The chess queen was once one of the weakest pieces
On the tile: Chess Queen1400s
In early chess, the piece beside the king was a counselor that could move only one square diagonally. The all-powerful queen emerged in 15th-century Spain. A Valencian poem, Scachs d'amor, probably written around 1475, already gives her modern moves, and Luis Ramirez de Lucena's book, published in Salamanca in 1497, is the earliest surviving treatise to describe them. The faster game spread quickly across Europe, and some called it madwoman's chess. Historian Marilyn Yalom has suggested that the great political power of Queen Isabella I of Castile may have inspired the change.
1The inventor behind Monopoly sold her patent for $500
On the tile: Lizzie Magie1904
Elizabeth Magie, born in Macomb, Illinois, in 1866, worked as a stenographer and typist in Washington, D.C., and had already patented an improvement for typewriters when she received a patent for The Landlord's Game in January 1904. Her board had railroads, a jail and properties to buy. She later gave it two sets of rules: in one the goal was to build monopolies and dominate opponents, and in the other everyone was rewarded when wealth was created. In November 1935, George Parker visited the inventor, then nearly 70, and bought her patent for $500, with no royalties.
2Clue began as a pianist's wartime blackout project
On the tile: Anthony Pratt1944
Anthony Pratt was a professional musician who played piano at country hotels, where murder mystery games were a regular entertainment. During World War II his poor eyesight kept him off the front line, and he worked in a Birmingham engineering factory making tank parts. To beat the boredom of the blackouts he devised a detective board game, and his wife, Elva, designed the board. Provisionally patented in 1944 under the title Murder, it had ten characters and nine weapons, including a bomb. Wartime shortages delayed its release until 1949, as Cluedo.
Eleanor Abbott, a retired schoolteacher, was recovering from polio in a San Diego hospital, surrounded by children who had the same disease. She designed a game for them that needed no reading or writing, only the ability to recognize colors: draw a color card, then move to a matching square. Milton Bradley introduced Candy Land in 1949, and it quickly became the company's best-selling board game. According to PBS's American Experience, Abbott donated all of her royalty income from Candy Land to charities serving children in need.
4Lincoln's new beard pushed Milton Bradley into games
On the tile: Milton Bradley1860
Milton Bradley ran a color lithography shop in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in 1860 his prints of a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln sold well. Then Lincoln grew a beard, the pictures no longer looked like him, and customers wanted refunds. Bradley turned to a game instead. The Checkered Game of Life sold more than 40,000 copies in its first year. Because dice were associated with gambling, players moved by spinning a teetotum, a numbered top. During the Civil War, Bradley made small travel games for bored soldiers.
The Robbins family of Reading, Ohio, loved crazy eights, but its tricky rule variations sometimes led to friendly family arguments. Merle Robbins, a barber, marked a deck with instructions: a king reversed the direction of play, a queen skipped the next turn and aces were wild. The marked decks made the game easier to learn, so Merle and his wife, Marie, sold their home and, with help from their son Ray, paid for 5,000 copies of a new game named Uno. They sold it from his barbershop and at campgrounds across Texas and Florida. Later Bob Tezak of Joliet, Illinois, bought it and took it worldwide.
6The director of The Red Balloon also invented Risk
On the tile: A. Lamorisse1957
French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse is best remembered for The Red Balloon, released in 1956, which won the Palme d'Or for short films at Cannes and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 1957 he also designed a board game, La Conquete du Monde, or The Conquest of the World. Parker Brothers bought the rights and published it with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. Players battle with dice rolls to occupy all 42 territories on a world map, and the game helped inspire many strategy games that followed.
7A dental technician designed Catan to escape work stress
On the tile: Klaus Teuber1995
Klaus Teuber, born in Germany in 1952, studied chemistry but joined his father's dental laboratory for family reasons. To balance that often stressful work, he began developing games in the early 1980s. His debut, Barbarossa, was named game of the year in 1988. In 1995 came The Settlers of Catan, in which players trade resources to build roads and settlements on an island. By the time Teuber died in 2023, more than 40 million copies had been sold, in more than 40 languages.
Goro Hasegawa came up with the idea for Othello as a student in Mito, Japan, in the years after World War II, and it caught on among classmates at recess. He later worked for a medical company but never forgot his game, and eventually pitched it to the toy maker Tsukuda, which released it in 1973. His father, an English literature expert, suggested naming it for Shakespeare's play. Its disks are dark on one side and light on the other, and the green board was meant to resemble a battlefield. By 2016, about 25 million sets had shipped in Japan alone.
Chris Haney, a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette, and Scott Abbott, a sports editor at The Canadian Press, invented Trivial Pursuit in 1979. To pay for manufacturing they offered shares to friends and colleagues, and many turned them down, to their later regret. A first run of 1,100 copies came out in 1981. After a slow start in the United States, the game took off, selling more than 15 million copies in 1984 alone. In 2008 Hasbro bought the full rights for $80 million US.
1A Babylonian tablet held the rules of a lost game
On the tile: Game of Urc. 2600 BC
Between 1922 and 1934, Leonard Woolley unearthed five boards for a race game in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, in what is now Iraq. The finest is roughly 4,500 years old. How to play seemed lost until the early 1980s, when British Museum curator Irving Finkel studied a clay tablet written in 177 BC by a Babylonian scribe, with a pattern of game squares on its back. Later, with his sister's help, Finkel found Ruby Daniel on a kibbutz in Israel. She remembered playing a descendant of the game as a child in Cochin, India.
2Senet began as a pastime and became a map of the afterlife
On the tile: Senetc. 3100 BC
Senet, played on 30 squares in three rows of ten, is one of the earliest known board games, with evidence from about 3100 BC. Tutankhamun was buried with a senet set, and Queen Nefertari was painted playing it. Egyptologist Peter Piccione has written that it began as a pastime with no religious significance and evolved into a simulation of the netherworld. On later boards, square 27 showed the waters of chaos, a trap where, in his reconstruction, a piece was lost. Moving pieces off the board came to stand for the soul's passage out of the underworld.
3An ancient Near Eastern race game turned up in Azerbaijan
On the tile: 58 HolesBronze Age
The game called 58 holes, or hounds and jackals, has two central rows and two curving outer rows of holes meeting at a larger hole. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an Egyptian set from about 1814 to 1805 BC, found in 1910 by Carnarvon and Carter. Archaeologist Walter Crist spotted the game's layout in a magazine photo of a rock shelter in Azerbaijan. When he visited in 2018, that site had been bulldozed, but at another rock shelter he found a roughly 4,000-year-old board pecked into stone, far from the Near East.
4The Aztec race game played for dangerously high stakes
On the tile: PatolliAztec era
In patolli, a gambling game of Mesoamerica, players raced pebbles along a cross-shaped track, using drilled beans as dice. A mat could simply be rolled out to start a game, and crowds gathered to watch and bet. Among the Aztecs the stakes could be extreme: the friar Diego Duran wrote that some players gambled themselves into slavery. The chronicler Francisco Lopez de Gomara reported that Montezuma sometimes watched games. After the conquest, the Spanish banned patolli, destroyed the mats and burned the beans they could find, and its exact rules were lost.
Viking raiders attacked the church on Lindisfarne, off England's northeast coast, on June 8, 793. In 2019 excavators working with DigVentures found a piece of swirling blue and white glass topped with a little crown of white glass droplets, about the size of a chocolate. Archaeologists believe it is a playing piece from hnefatafl, the Viking game of king's table, or a local version of it. It came from a trench dated to the eighth to ninth centuries. It may have been dropped by a raider or owned by a local imitating Norse customs.
Modern chess traces its roots to chaturanga, an Indian game whose Sanskrit name refers to the four divisions of an army: infantry, cavalry, chariots and war elephants. By about AD 600 the game had reached Persia's Sasanian Empire, where it was called chatrang. Persian players said shah mat when an opponent's shah, or king, was trapped, and that is where the word checkmate comes from. After Arab armies conquered Persia, the game became shatranj, its pieces took on abstract shapes, and it reached Europe by several routes, including Muslim Spain.
7An ancient Chinese game became a landmark for computers
On the tile: Go (Weiqi)
Go, called weiqi in China, is played by placing black and white stones on a 19-by-19 grid to control territory. It was already a staple of Chinese culture when Confucius mentioned it in his Analects, and it became one of the four arts expected of a scholar-gentleman. Its simple rules hide enormous complexity, so it was long considered a far harder challenge for computers than chess. In March 2016 in Seoul, Google's AlphaGo program won the first three games of a five-game match against master Lee Se-dol. Lee won the fourth.
8A valley of mancala boards carved into Kenyan rock
On the tile: Mancala
Mancala games, played by sowing stones or seeds around rows of pits, are still played around the world. A local tip about tourists taking stone hand axes from a prehistoric site led Yale archaeologist Veronica Waweru to the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in central Kenya. There, in 2023, she noticed rows of shallow pits drilled into a rock ledge: about 20 boards she believes ancient people used for mancala, some carved over older ones. Their differing erosion suggests some are older than others, though their precise age is hard to determine. She called it an ancient arcade.
Ludus latrunculorum, loosely the game of mercenaries, was a two-player strategy game played throughout the Roman Empire. In the first century BC the writer Varro mentioned it in passing, likening a grid of grammar forms to its board. A later poem, the Laus Pisonis, pictures a battle of glass pieces and a winner whose hands rattle with captives. The exact rules are lost, but one modern reconstruction has players capture a lone enemy piece by surrounding it with two of their own. Two fifth-century bone tokens found in Turkey may have belonged to this game or another Roman one.
Playing cards entered Europe from the Islamic world. A remarkable Mamluk pack, identified at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul by the scholar Leo Aryeh Mayer in 1939, has suits of coins, cups, swords and polo sticks. Its court cards show no people, only abstract designs and calligraphy, and the ornament is so lavish that telling the cards apart can be hard. In Europe, card makers replaced such courts with kings and their attendants. Italian and Spanish decks still use coins, cups, swords and batons, a close match for the Mamluk arrangement.
2Tarot cards were made for games, not fortune-telling
On the tile: Tarot1400sMyth busted
Tarot cards are widely linked with fortune-telling and ancient Egyptian wisdom, but they began as game cards. In 15th-century Italy, card makers added extra picture cards that acted as permanent trumps, called triumph cards, and the 78-card tarot pack was used for trick-taking games that are still played today. The earliest known use of tarot cards for fortune-telling came around 1750 in Bologna. The claim of an Egyptian origin was first put forward in 1781, long after the pack was known in Europe.
3The king of hearts is not really stabbing himself
On the tile: Suicide KingMyth busted
On a standard deck, the king of hearts seems to be driving a sword into his own head, which earned him the nickname the Suicide King. The real culprit is sloppy copying. Early English cards showed the king wielding a battle axe. As blockmakers redrew the design over the years, the axe lost its head, and by around 1800 the shaft had become a sword disappearing behind the king's head. Careless copying explains another quirk too: the king of hearts once had a mustache, and lost it the same way.
In England the lowest court card was long called the knave, an old word for a male servant. In the game All Fours, though, the knave of trumps was called the jack, a word that could also mean a common man. When card makers in the mid-1800s began printing small value marks in the corners, K for king and Q for queen worked fine, but Kn for knave was too easily confused with K. Jack gave a clear J. The word sounded low-class at first: in Great Expectations, Estella mocks Pip for calling knaves jacks.
The ornate ace of spades is a leftover from taxes. English monarchs saw playing cards as a handy source of revenue, and a duty on packs ran from 1711 until 1960. To show it had been paid, one card was stamped, and from about 1718 that card was the ace of spades, probably because it sat on top of the pack. From 1765 the tax office printed the ace itself, and forging one was a capital offense. Card makers later created their own ornate aces, and the fancy design outlived the tax.
The joker is an American addition to the deck. In euchre, a game with roots in Alsace, the two top trumps are jacks called the right and left bowers, from the German word Bauer. Americans added an even higher trump, the Best Bower or Imperial Bower. The card maker Samuel Hart is thought to have issued the first illustrated one, his Imperial Bower, in 1863. One theory says the name joker grew out of euchre itself. Americans later added the extra card to other games too, usually as a wild card.
In the 1680s, New France was short of coins. Soldiers had arrived without cash for their pay, and funds from France came only with the annual ships. The colony's intendant, Jacques de Meulles, found an ingenious fix. He took packs of playing cards, wrote an amount on the back of each card and signed it. An ordinance declared that the cards must be accepted at face value until the ships arrived and they could be redeemed. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls it the first paper money to circulate in North America.
Long before video games, Nintendo was a card company. In 1889 Fusajiro Yamauchi began making and selling hanafuda, Japanese flower cards, in Kyoto. Hanafuda descend from playing cards that Portuguese traders brought to Japan, and a deck has 48 cards in 12 flower-themed suits, one for each month. In 1902 the company began making the first Western-style playing cards in Japan, and in 1953 it became the first company in Japan to mass-produce plastic playing cards. Its first home video game machines arrived in 1977.
9Hoyle signed his book by hand to beat the pirates
On the tile: Edmond Hoyle1742
The phrase according to Hoyle honors Edmond Hoyle, who in 1742, at age 70, published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist. He had been giving whist lessons in London, and he apparently charged a guinea for the book. After he sold the rights to the bookseller Francis Cogan, two printers pirated it. Among their countermeasures, Hoyle autographed every authorized copy, and the piracies soon disappeared from the market. Modern Hoyle rule books contain none of his original text and include hundreds of games unknown in his time.