Board Game Studies Journal
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on the history and study of board games, published with Sciendo (De Gruyter).
Documents
Maldivian Chess (Raazuvaa)
This paper by Georgi Markov, published in the Board Game Studies Journal, documents the rules of Maldivian chess, known locally as raazuvaa, a game that has been largely overlooked in chess history and earlier literature.
- Maldivian chess (raazuvaa) uses standard orthochess setup and piece movement but omits the initial double pawn move and castling, promotes pawns only to queens (in unrestricted numbers), and treats a bare king as a win unless it can capture the opponent's last piece.
- Stalemate is a loss for the stalemated player in raazuvaa, and the kings are placed crosswise with the queen to the king's right.
- Markov argues raazuvaa is not a variant of Indian chess as earlier accounts claimed, but is closely related to pre-19th-century Ottoman Turkish chess, possibly a surviving relic of that tradition.
German Names for Merels
Jonas Richter's "German Names for Merels" traces the naming history of the nine men's morris game in German, with related Dutch, French, and Latin material, and asks how the mill-based name that dominates today in Germany and Austria came to replace an older number-based tradition.
- Jonas Richter's article traces German names for the nine men's morris game, contrasting an older number-based tradition (e.g., "Neunstein", "den neunten stein ziehen") with the mill-based tradition ("Mühle") that dominates in Germany and Austria today.
- Richter argues that "Mühle" did not originally name the game but first denoted positional formations, especially a row of three pieces and the "running mill" (Fick- or Zwickmühle), before becoming the name of the whole game.
- The earliest German attestation identified is an early-fifteenth-century translation of Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, rendering French merelier with a verbal phrase, while "Neunstein" appears in a 1432 Stuttgart contract.
Mathematical Analysis of the Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur, an ancient board game, is examined here through rigorous mathematical methods, filling a gap in prior scholarship that had proposed rule-sets without analyzing them quantitatively.
- The report analyzes several historical rule variants of the Royal Game of Ur (Bell/British Museum, Masters, Skiriuk, Murray, Aseb), finding the Murray and Masters/Skiriuk paths have the highest state-space complexity due to longer routes and more contestable war-zone tiles.
- State-space complexity rises to a peak and then declines as piece count increases, so it alone is an insufficient measure of difficulty.
- Bell/British Museum rules have a game-tree complexity of about 5.3 × 10^115, which far exceeds state-space complexity yet stays below that of Backgammon, placing the game between Checkers/Ludo and Backgammon in required skill.
Reassessing Roman and Late Antique 'Marbles Lanes': One Game or Many?
This study reassesses Roman and Late Antique "marble lanes," rectangular stone boards with rows of circular pockets used for rolling or throwing games, and asks whether these artefacts represent a single standardised game or a loosely connected family of games.
- The study argues that Roman and Late Antique marble lanes were not one standardised game but a loosely connected family of games, challenging the assumption of a single shared ruleset.
- Scholarly identifications of marble lanes have been inconsistent, ranging from a mancala-type game and a target-pocket game to a point-scoring game, and the textual evidence is thin and ambiguous.
- Because textual sources are sparse, the analysis relies heavily on iconography, especially late second- and third-century sarcophagi showing children rolling balls down inclined planes, together with material evidence from the boards.
Finding Ludemes in Modern Board Games: Analyzing the Top Number One Games of Board Game Geek
Micael Sousa's study examines the seven games that held the number one ranking on BoardGameGeek (BGG) from 2000 onward, ranging from Paths of Glory to Gloomhaven, in order to identify "ludemes," the atomic or compound conceptual design elements that can be transferred between games.
- The study analyzes the seven games that held the number one ranking on BoardGameGeek from 2000 onward, using the site's crowdsourced rankings and an MDA/MDE-adapted framework to identify transferable design elements called "ludemes."
- The central finding is that board progression can be understood through two dimensions, growth/accumulation (filling adjacent grids or areas) and movement/advancement (traveling along networks or paths), with the spatial network or grid structure a plausible compound ludeme that could transfer across titles.
- Top-ranked games shifted over time from longer, conflict-heavy wargames toward shorter titles typically playable in one to two hours, with more cooperative or constructive designs.
Games of Character: The Role of Board, Dice & Card Games in Popular Cinema
Mark A. Hall's "Games of Character" examines how board, dice, and card games function as narrative and symbolic devices in popular cinema, arguing that these games are rarely incidental props but instead signal character, intelligence, fate, and social standing.
- Chess is the dominant motif in the corpus, with 219 to 239 identified film appearances depending on counting method, far ahead of dice and knucklebones (about 48 to 51) and draughts (26).
- Games in popular cinema function mainly as characterization devices that signal intelligence, moral choice, social standing, fate, or conspiracy rather than serving as incidental props.
- Chess's cinematic conventions largely derive from medieval imagination about the game's performative and moral qualities, which is why it consistently conveys intelligence and social mobility.
Schälchenkreise in Xanthos
The paper examines a set of small circular arrangements of cup-marks (Schälchenkreise) found at Xanthos in Lycia, arguing that they are the remains of board games and tracing their origins and distribution.
- Seven small cup-mark circles at Xanthos in Lycia, on the second step of the so-called "sarcophagus pilier," are argued to be remains of board games, with the authors placing that monument plausibly in the Hellenistic period and the circles no older than that.
- A larger, more deeply incised circle with a psi-like figure is carved into a block reused in the back wall of the theatre, rebuilt in the second half of the second century AD, giving the Xanthos circles a possible window of more than 350 years.
- The authors distinguish three variants by cup-mark count and arrangement: ten marks around a central one, eleven marks in a circle or oval, and a combined form.
Where Did the Games Go? Inquiry of Board Games in Medieval Marathi Literature in India
Board game traditions appear to have declined in medieval Maharashtra between roughly the 13th and 17th centuries, a puzzle the study sets out to examine.
- Board game traditions appear to have declined in medieval Maharashtra between roughly the 13th and 17th centuries, a gap that is conspicuous because neighboring regions such as Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan preserve documented board game traditions.
- Searches of Marathi architecture yielded no board game inscriptions, and surviving inscriptions in Maharashtra are largely pre-Islamic and undated, leaving the medieval period absent from the material record and forcing the investigation toward literary sources.
- Bhakti-movement literature mentions games such as Sāripata, Ēkibēkī, Okībokī, and Budhdibaḷa (chess), while the early twentieth-century Marāṭhī Khēḷānc̄ē Pustaka includes games absent from medieval sources, including Navkankari, Solah Gutti, Mancala, and tiger-goat hunt games, which the authors suggest either disappeared and re-emerged or were introduced through later cultural transmission.
Three Large Chess Variants from India and Germany: A Note on Their Rules
This paper addresses the rules of three large chess variants: Hyderabad Decimal Chess, an eighteenth-century Indian game, and two nineteenth-century German games, Kaiserspiel on a 10x10 board and Sultanspiel on an 11x11 board.
- The surviving historical sources for Hyderabad Decimal Chess (1790s manuscript) describe only part of the game, so earlier reconstructions by Gollon and Pritchard rest largely on speculative gap-filling rather than evidence.
- Tressau's 1840 rules are treated as the authoritative source for the German games Kaiserspiel (10x10) and Sultanspiel (11x11), with errors and omissions identified in the later accounts of Verney (1885) and Cazaux and Knowlton (2017) on castling, promotion, stalemate, and starting setups.
- The author questions Cazaux and Knowlton's (2017) claim that Indian variants require a pawn to wait on the promotion square, noting that many such variants let a pawn stay on the penultimate rank while delivering check, though their promotion rules are otherwise considered a clear advance.
Rolling Dice for Divination, Gambling and Homeromanteia
Rolling Dice for Divination, Gambling and Homeromanteia examines the use of dice as instruments of lot-divination in the ancient and later Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on the Roman Imperial-era practice of Homeromanteia.
- Homeromanteia was a Roman Imperial-era practice in which rolling dice selected a verse from the Iliad or Odyssey that was read as a prophetic answer, with three six-sided dice yielding one of 216 possible verses.
- Papyrological sources such as P. Oxy. LVI 3831 and PGM VII show that these oracles blended dice gambling logic with religious belief, including hemeromancy (determining lucky and unlucky days) and mediation by bilingual priests.
- The author argues these texts functioned as didactic handbooks and places the practice within cybomancy, the broader category of divination by dice and lots.
Plato Plays Polis
"Plato Plays Polis" argues that the pun Socrates makes at Republic 422e, likening the multiple cities under discussion to the ancient counter game polis, is both philosophically apt and historically grounded.
- Plato's pun at Republic 422e compares the cities under discussion to the ancient counting game polis, and the article argues this is both philosophically apt and historically grounded.
- Philosophically, the guardians of Callipolis resemble the identical, interchangeable pessoi pieces of the game, and the dialogue links learning polis to philosophical education.
- Historically, the Republic's setting recapitulates the Athenian civil war of 403 BC, with Socrates' route to the Piraeus retracing the movements of Thrasybulus and Critias, making polis a game played for the city itself.
Roman Game Finds from Cremona (Italy)
This study, published in the Board Game Studies Journal, documents Roman gaming artifacts recovered from Cremona in northern Italy and situates them within the broader Roman game culture of the late Republic and early Empire.
- The Cremona assemblage (c. 40 BC–AD 69) is tightly bounded in time and linked to the destruction of the city by Vespasian's troops during the civil war of AD 69, including thirteen glass counters and two ivory dice from the Domus del ninfeo at Piazza Marconi.
- The study argues that the "Alexandrian" counters, dated from the Caesarian period to the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with some use into the early second century AD, served a gaming rather than a theatre-ticket function.
- Complete fifteen-counter sets recovered from infant graves at Kerch and Rugge support the gaming interpretation of the Alexandrian counter type.