The long-lost parlour games ripe for reviving
Self-isolation is the perfect opportunity to rediscover some ancient – and absorbing – games, says enthusiast Ivan Hewett
To weather the reality of weeks or even months stuck indoors, we’ll need something more than telly and Netflix. One way to fill those vacant hours is to rediscover the ancient appeal of games. The trouble is we’ve forgotten them all. How many actually know the rules of Old Maid and nine men’s morris, let alone really ancient games such as hnefatafl or knucklebones?
The time might be ripe to revive some of these old games, particularly the Medieval ones. With these, the element of chance was often high, and where chance is involved you can always bet on the outcome. Which is why until Victorian times, playing a game was inseparable from the heady thrill of gambling.
This connection goes right back to the earliest traces of games. When the tomb of the 16th century BC Egyptian queen Hatshepsut was opened, they found a set of dice among the many household items buried alongside her, to accompany her to the other world. And – just to add spice to the story – they weren’t ordinary dice. They were loaded.
Loaded or not, games of dice have a power to mesmerise which, when combined with gambling on their outcome, is unbeatable. Moralists may tut, but I wonder whether bringing the gaming spirit into households, for harmlessly modest stakes – the last chocolate, for instance – might not be one of the best ways to keep our spirits up?
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus offers an august example of the cheering power of games of chance. He tells the story of King Atys of Lydia, whose kingdom was afflicted with famine, so he passed a law that allowed his people to eat only every other day. To help them weather the hunger pangs on fasting days, he encouraged them to play dice. It kept them going for 18 years.
Closer to our own time, soldiers in the trenches during the First World War kept the fear of death at bay by playing games of chance for high stakes. It was as if the thrill of the game temporarily banished the game of chance that ruled their lives. Vernon Bartlett, the journalist and MP who served in Flanders, recalls gambling on the card game vingtet-un in an officer’s hut while drinking two bottles of champagne, before an attack.
But even if you approach them in a spirit of pure play, without the added thrill of a wager, these old games have an absorbing mix of skill and chance that could while away many a long evening. Medieval board games offered three very effective substitutes for the thrill of gambling, which were the thrill of the chase, the race, or fight. They brought into the sittingroom an enlivening blast of outdoor rumbustiousness.
Among them was tables, a popular racing game, imported like so many games (including chess) from Persia via Arab traders in Spain and Sicily. Two players use three dice to move 15 men each over a board with three sets of 12 “points” or squares.
Another favourite was fox and geese, which was hugely popular across the social scale; King Edward IV had a set of fox and geese pieces made from solid silver. The single fox won if he captured all the 17 geese by jumping over them; the geese won if they succeeded in hemming in the fox.
Hnefatafl, another “chase and capture” game, ruled supreme before chess came along. As in fox and geese, there was a solitary quarry, a king who started at the centre and who – if he was successful – accrued followers to defend him against the attackers, who were grouped around the edge.
Then there were the numerous variations on the humble noughts and crosses, based on the idea of “three-ina-row”, which is also at the root of the amusement-arcade slot machine.
Three men’s morris was a more complex variety played with pieces on a board, in which each player could try to make up a row by moving a piece one step along any line. More complex still were nine, 11 or 12 men’s morris.
Card games also had that irresistible mix of chance and skill, a thrill often augmented by gambling on the outcome. Card games grew from the tarot cards used for fortune telling. Over time, the “triumph” cards indicating a particular condition – emperor, hermit, death and so forth – dropped away, leaving behind the idea of the “trump” suit that beats all other suits. The suits were originally named after varieties of weapon or forms of money; for instance what we call “spades” was originally the Spanish espadas, meaning a pike.
The earliest card games were, in fact, either Spanish or French in origin, and in some cases their rules are lost. One whose rules survive is ombre, a pool-winning game played with 40 cards, with the eights, nines and tens removed from the pack; the “ombre” was the man who won the pool.
As time passes, games start to change. The military and hunting motifs fade away, and games start to become more decorous, “indoorsy” and respectable. An early 18th century guide to games described backgammon as “a respectable game of amusement, quite fitting for country rectors”. In the Victorian era, the idea of “amusements” took hold, with games such as charades and hunt the slipper popular around the family hearth. Happy families, a card game invented in 1848, inculcated wholesome family values in the guise of entertainment. Games for the children’s playroom sometimes proved popular with the grown-ups too, as in the case of tiddlywinks, the most popular board game of the era.
If you like your games to be gently amusing and less punchy, you’ll prefer these games of a later era. For me, the old games have much more charm and excitement. Their rules are ingenious, the chase thrilling, and their picturesque imagery gives us a flavour of long-vanished ways of life.
Old games have charm. They are thrilling and give us a flavour of a longvanished way of life