Board to Page to Board: Native American Antecedents of Two Proprietary Board Games

Winkelman's article argues that two proprietary board games have Native American antecedents rather than the European origins usually assumed. The first claim is that the German "hat" game Fang den Hut! (1927) descends from Boolik, a Mayan running-fight game described by Stewart Culin, rather than from European Pachisi or Scandinavian running-fight games. The strongest evidence is the distinctive capture-by-stacking mechanism and the game's life cycle, which correspond closely to Culin's account, with Lasca offered as a less convincing alternative. The second and more substantial claim concerns Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game (1902/1904), which the author traces to Zohn Ahl, a Kiowa game documented by Culin in Chess and Playing-Cards (1898).

The argument for Zohn Ahl rests on structural comparison. Both games use a closed circuit with no finish line, a zero-sum counter-based scoring system, and a 40-point square track. Culin himself suggests adapting the game to "the parlor of civilization," a remark the author treats as a notable hint of later transmission. The article rejects the calendrical diagram proposed by Freeman-Witthoft as a more plausible source. Magie's genuine contribution, in this reading, was the property-purchase and rent economy, which the author regards as a major innovation built on an embryonic Native American precedent.

The scope of the analysis spans Mesoamerican and Indigenous North American game traditions, drawing on ethnographic and archaeological sources such as Sapper's 1906 study of Kekchi games and Verbeeck's work on patolli and bul. The historical focus runs from the late nineteenth-century ethnographic record through the early twentieth-century patents and commercial games that followed. The article's reference apparatus draws on established board game histories, including Murray's 1951 survey and Parlett's 1999 Oxford History of Board Games, alongside Pilon's 2015 account of the Monopoly scandal. Published in Board Game Studies Journal 10 (2016), pp. 17–31, the work sits within a scholarly effort to reassess the origins of commercial games.