The Game of Seven: Glückshaus and Related Dice Games

The Game of Seven is a family of stake-board dice games played with two six-sided dice on boards numbered 2 through 12, with the 7 given special emphasis. This study argues that "Glückshaus," the name now widely attached to these games, refers specifically to a later modern branch rather than to the whole historical family, and it proposes that "game of seven" is the more accurate general term. Its central questions concern the age of the oldest boards and rules, the reasons the number 4 is absent from many layouts, and when the Glückshaus name first appeared.

The surviving evidence consists of wooden inlay boards from German-speaking regions dated roughly 1600 to 1730, sharing a common 3x3 layout, along with an older two-sided board in the Bavarian National Museum that may date to about 1475–1525 and whose dice-face fields hint at an earlier version. The key documentary sources are the 1733 rules Palamedes Redivivus for the "Böse-Sieben-Spiel," a drinking game in which only the 7 is exceptional, and an illustrated print of about 1740, Der Siebener Trinckt. The basic mechanic appears to have been shared across these early versions, and it was later adapted into the French Jeu du Juif, attested from 1783, whose antisemitic character is treated as a serious and explicit feature of that branch.

Tracing the game across seventeenth- to twentieth-century Europe, the study finds that layouts and special rules for the 2, 7, and 12 varied widely while retaining a common dice-based structure. It argues that Jeu du Juif and the related Der Geizhals belong to the same tradition, and that the Glückshaus name was apparently coined by Erwin Glonnegger in 1963 rather than existing as an attested historical title. Glonnegger's claims of a widespread medieval origin are judged poorly supported by surviving sources.

The author concludes that the modern Glückshaus, popularized by Glonnegger in 1972 and by Grunfeld's Games of the World in 1977, differs substantively from the historical boards: the 7 moves to a wedding field, the 4 is omitted, and a rolled 4 passes the dice. The historical boards are better compared to card-game layouts, and the original name of the earliest game remains unknown, since early boards carry no illustrations and the sixteenth-century references in Fischart's catalog are uncertain. The reference list draws on French, German