The story of board games

Board games are among the oldest known forms of entertainment. Senet, played in Egypt from around 3000 BCE or earlier, used a board of thirty squares and throwing sticks. Over time it took on religious meaning, representing the journey of the soul through the afterlife, and senet boards were placed in tombs, including Tutankhamun's.

The Royal Game of Ur, found in royal tombs in Mesopotamia and dating to about 2600 BCE, was a race game played on a board of twenty squares. In the 1980s Irving Finkel of the British Museum reconstructed its rules from a cuneiform tablet written much later, showing the game was still played around two thousand years after the board was made.

Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago, where it is called weiqi. Players take turns placing black and white stones on a grid, usually 19 by 19 lines, trying to surround more territory than their opponent. Its rules are simple, but its strategy is extraordinarily deep.

In China, Go was considered one of the four arts that a cultivated scholar should master. It spread to Korea, where it is called baduk, and Japan, where professional Go schools flourished for centuries. The number of possible Go positions is vastly larger than the number of possible chess positions.

• Mancala is a family of sowing games, played by moving seeds or stones around rows of pits; versions are played across Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia.
• Backgammon descends from ancient race games such as the Roman tabula and a Persian game called nard.
• Backgammon combines luck, through dice, with skill in deciding how to move.
• Draughts, or checkers, developed in Europe by the twelfth century and uses a chessboard.
• Pachisi from India inspired the Western games Ludo and Parcheesi.

Many modern board games began with a moral or educational purpose. In the nineteenth century, games such as The Mansion of Happiness taught children that virtue led to reward. Snakes and ladders came from an Indian game, often called moksha patam, in which ladders represented virtues and snakes represented vices.

Monopoly has its roots in The Landlord's Game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904 to show how land monopolies enriched property owners and impoverished tenants. The version sold by Parker Brothers from 1935 became one of the best-selling board games in history.

The late twentieth century brought a new style of board game from Germany, often called Eurogames. The Settlers of Catan, published in 1995, became an international success. Such games emphasise strategy and trading, reduce the role of luck and avoid eliminating players partway through.

Board games have enjoyed a strong revival in the twenty-first century, with thousands of new titles released each year, crowdfunding platforms supporting independent designers, and board game cafes opening in cities worldwide.

Board games bring people together around a shared set of rules, combining competition with social connection. Historians and anthropologists see them as windows into the values of their cultures: what a society considered skilful, lucky, virtuous or worth winning.

Games have also been important in science and technology. Researchers have long used games to study decision-making, and in 2016 DeepMind's AlphaGo program defeated the top Go player Lee Sedol, a landmark in computing because Go had been considered especially difficult for computers.