Back to the Game: Reframing Play and Games in Context

This introductory volume to the Board Game Studies Journal assembles papers originating from the 21st International Society for Board Game Studies conference, held in Athens in April 2018, and from the ERC-funded Locus Ludi project on play and games in Classical Antiquity. Its central argument is that gaming objects can only be properly understood when reframed within their archaeological, funerary, sacred, and cultural contexts, since identical artefacts such as dice, counters, and carved stone boards may serve ludic, ritual, educational, or symbolic functions depending on where they are found. The volume is organized into three parts covering archaeological evidence, visual representations on monuments, and literary allusions to games, spanning a chronological range from the Late Minoan period around the fifteenth century BC into Late Antiquity and beyond.

The archaeological section highlights recurring methodological problems, especially the multifunctionality of objects and the blurred boundary between games and religious practice. Case studies include Late Bronze Age animal figurines and cone shell groups from Crete and Mycenae, stones with cup holes from a Cypriot temple, Archaic Attic and Boeotian funerary assemblages that challenge the assumption that gaming equipment was exclusively male, and Roman game finds from Cremona. A notable finding is that several pavement designs in Athens long presumed to be game boards may date no earlier than Late Antiquity, prompting reconsideration of earlier chronologies.

The second section examines visual and monumental representations, including a Thessalian relief that may depict pedagogy linking board games with numeracy, a Boeotian statue whose knucklebones symbolize luck, and catacomb marble boards that may be funerary slabs rather than reused game boards. The final section explores how games served as metaphors and plot devices in Plato, Homeric divination, and ancient fiction. Taken together, the contributions argue that context, rather than form alone, determines the meaning of play in antiquity.