Board Game Studies Journal
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on the history and study of board games, published with Sciendo (De Gruyter).
Documents
A Game That Never Was: Verney's Duodecimal Chess
Georgi Markov's article examines a 12x12 chess variant that arose from a series of misreadings by G. H. Verney, author of Chess Eccentricities (1885).
- Verney's Duodecimal Chess is a hybrid game that never existed historically: G. H. Verney, in Chess Eccentricities (1885), unintentionally combined an out-of-context diagram with H. C. Albers' rules and piece moves to produce it.
- The game's errors trace to misreadings of A. van der Linde's Quellenstudien zur Geschichte des Schachspiels and Albers' 19th-century 'improved' Courier Chess, including reversed diagram viewpoints and substitution of Albers' pieces for medieval ones.
- Despite its accidental origins, the 12x12 game is surprisingly playable, featuring unicorns (bishop plus knight), a 'king's councillor' (king plus knight), and a 'queen's fool' (a non-royal king).
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.
- The report argues that "Glückshaus" refers specifically to a later modern branch of the dice-and-board game family, and proposes "game of seven" as the more accurate general term for the whole historical family.
- Surviving evidence includes wooden inlay boards from German-speaking regions dated roughly 1600 to 1730 sharing a 3x3 layout, plus an older two-sided board in the Bavarian National Museum possibly dating to about 1475–1525.
- Key documentary sources are the 1733 rules Palamedes Redivivus for the "Böse-Sieben-Spiel" and an illustrated print of about 1740, Der Siebener Trinckt; the basic mechanic was later adapted into the French Jeu du Juif, attested from 1783, which has an explicitly antisemitic character.
Chasing Geese: On the Trail of Fourteen British-Published Copies of The Royal Pastime of Cupid, or Entertaining Game of the Snake
Duggan's study traces the publishing history of The Royal Pastime of Cupid, a spiral race game closely related to The Game of the Goose, which unfolds over a 63-square coiled-serpent track and relies entirely on chance.
- The study aims to establish a more reliable chronology for the printed editions of The Royal Pastime of Cupid, a chance-based spiral race game related to The Game of the Goose, whose editions have often been catalogued with unreliable dates.
- The earliest known example is a Spanish-language Antwerp print by Pieter de Jode (c. 1620), with French and Dutch editions following in the 1620s through 1640s.
- The Garrett print is the earliest documented British edition, with a copy annotated by Narcissus Luttrell as purchased in 1690, and its original issue is placed between roughly 1676 and 1720.
Le formateur et son public dans le cadre de l'élaboration d'une simulation de type wargame sur plateau
This article by Goria and Hardy, published in the Board Game Studies Journal, examines how historical and business wargames can be designed and facilitated as pedagogical and strategic-analysis tools, with particular attention to the target audience that shapes every design decision.
- The article proposes a three-phase design process (exploration, prototyping, exploitation) in which a minimum viable product is iteratively playtested against four criteria: historical realism, player skill, the role of chance, and playability including game duration.
- Business wargames can be co-designed by a trainer with employees, clients and suppliers, with the market as the board, value-chain elements as pawns rated on numerical strength and projection attributes, and rules encoding competitive dynamics.
- The board wargame is presented as a low-cost, transparent and adaptable training medium, especially suited to contexts where digital simulations may be unsuitable.
Lizzie Magie: America's First Lady of Games
David Parlett's article profiles Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie (1866–1948), a Georgist inventor whom he argues deserves recognition as the true originator of Monopoly, and whom he proposes as "America's first lady of games."
- Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Magie (1866–1948), a Georgist inventor, patented The Landlord's Game in 1904, and David Parlett argues she is the true originator of Monopoly, which Charles Darrow published via Parker Brothers in 1933.
- Parlett credits Magie with converting a linear race-game path into a closed circuit and introducing property purchase and rent-charging between players, mechanics he considers largely unprecedented in race games.
- The game evolved from an explicitly capitalist-framed objective into a more anti-monopolist version, then was adopted and reshaped by Quaker communities such as Arden, Delaware, before becoming the basis for Darrow's Monopoly.
The Comoros: A Confluence of Board Game Histories
This study by Alex de Voogt examines the board games played on Grande Comore, the largest island of the Comoros archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and argues that their distribution reflects layered historical contact with East Africa, France, and the Ottoman Empire.
- Fieldwork in June 2018 documented how board games are practiced on Grande Comore, the largest island of the Comoros archipelago in the Indian Ocean, with the study arguing their distribution reflects layered contact with East Africa, France, and the Ottoman Empire.
- Mraha wa tso (Bao) is played communally at village squares and mosques rather than in the capital Moroni, while Mraha wa bwe, a Siga variant, is played informally in the city center.
- Three games called Dama were identified: a 100-square Checkers variant reflecting French colonial influence, a Turkish Draughts variant recorded as the southernmost attestation to date, and an Alquerque variant on a 12-square board.
Agon und Ares: Der Krieg und die Spiele
This review by Bernd-Peter Lange assesses Ernst Strouhal's edited volume "Agon und Ares.
- Ernst Strouhal's edited volume "Agon und Ares. Der Krieg und die Spiele" (Campus Verlag, 2016) collects essays from a 2015 symposium at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaft in Vienna, examining war-themed games across cultures and centuries.
- The collection's theoretical frame draws on Huizinga's view of play as a source of culture and Roger Caillois's typology, with particular attention to agonistic games and the cultural history of board games, which Strouhal identifies as a neglected field.
- Strouhal's central claim is that chess and war are not deeply congruent: chess pursues planning, while war is contingency management, though several essays show that chess structures and military metaphors still shaped game design.
Mittelalterliche Würfelspiele mit Einsatz und Gewinn
Thomas Bronder's study examines the betting structures of medieval dice games, focusing on the twelve games described in Alfonso X's thirteenth-century Book of Games, together with the closely related games Azar and Guirguiesca.
- Medieval betting dice games such as the twelve games in Alfonso X's thirteenth-century Book of Games, plus Azar and Guirguiesca, were two-player zero-sum contests in which stakes were settled by mutual agreement rather than a neutral pot.
- The 216 outcomes of three-dice sums form a hat-shaped distribution with an 18.52% chance of ending a game in the Azar range, a distribution likely known to Alfonso via De Vetula but never stated in the text.
- For Azar, the unequal hit probabilities of its two outcome groups (roughly 1:4.4) meant about two-thirds of games were decided by repeated hits on the chance points.
Mancala in Surinamese Maroon Communities: The Expedition of Melville J. Herskovits
This study examines three mancala game boards held by the American Museum of Natural History that originate from Suriname, formerly Dutch Guyana, and traces their connection to the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and a 1928 ethnological expedition.
- The three mancala boards at the American Museum of Natural History from Suriname are tied to anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and his 1928 ethnological expedition, with one Saamaka board on public display and two Djuka boards acquired separately in 1944.
- The 1928 expedition, led in part by Morton C. Khan with Melville and Francis Herskovits, aimed to assess European cultural influence on Afro-Surinamese communities, collecting some 346 Saamaka and 10 Amerindian specimens and producing a short 16 mm film now held in the Smithsonian's film archives.
- Comparison of the film footage with Herskovits's later descriptions shows the two groups' boards differ in structure: the Djuka board has six cups per row and four counters per cup, while the Saamaka board has five cups per row and ten counters per cup, with each group using distinct local terms for the game.
Ancient American Board Games, I: From Teotihuacan to the Great Plains
Depaulis's paper traces the history of ancient American board games from their Mesoamerican origins at Teotihuacán (c. 4th–7th century AD) northward to the Southwest and Great Plains, with particular attention to the stick-dice race game patolli and its descendants.
- The central claim is that a Mesoamerican board game attested in codices, carvings, and archaeological boards disappeared from central Mexico before the Spanish conquest but survived in the Tarascan region of Michoacán as k'uilichi, documented by Beals and Carrasco in 1944.
- Three board types have been recovered from Teotihuacán and Maya sites including Copán, Tikal, and Palenque, and roughly two dozen additional gameboards have been recorded in Michoacán alone.
- The Type I board survives in the modern Tarascan game, directly linking archaeological material from the Teotihuacán-era tradition (c. 4th–7th century AD) to living practice.
Culture of Sedentary Play in India: The Space Context
This paper by Amit S. Deshmukh examines how sedentary board games in India have shaped and been shaped by physical space, arguing that spatial analysis offers a more useful lens for understanding Indian game culture than purely art-historical or sociological approaches.
- The paper argues that spatial analysis, rather than purely art-historical or sociological approaches, offers a more useful lens for understanding Indian sedentary game culture, assessing a game's 'space envelope' both tangibly (reach, seating) and intangibly (emotional responses framed through rasa and bhava).
- Archaeological, Vedic, Mahabharata, medieval temple graffiti, and Mughal and Rajasthani painting evidence is used to trace board games in India, with temple case studies at Doddagaddavalli, Pedgaon, and Hampi (Vijayanagara) showing game boards carved into floors across Hoysala, Yadava, and Vijayanagara phases.
- The presence of game boards in temple floors suggests temples functioned as public social spaces as well as religious ones.
Theory of the Introduction of Shogi via Southeast Asia: Viewed from the Forms of Makruk Pieces
This study by Yasuji Shimizu examines whether Japanese Shogi reached Japan via Southeast Asia, a hypothesis first proposed by Alex Randolph in 1971 and based on three shared features with Thai Makruk: the placement of pawn-equivalent pieces on the third rank, the movement of the Silver General-type piece, and the reversing of…
- The study examines whether Japanese Shogi reached Japan via Southeast Asia, a hypothesis first proposed by Alex Randolph in 1971 based on three features shared with Thai Makruk: third-rank pawn-equivalent placement, Silver General-type movement, and reversing of promoted pawn-equivalent pieces.
- The author treats the reversing rule as the key prerequisite for the Southeast Asia theory and argues the first two commonalities are not decisive, since a Xiangqi predecessor with third-rank placement and a Silver General-like piece in twelfth-century northern India weaken the case for Southeast Asian origin.
- Morphological analysis covered 14 pieces at the Bangkok National Museum attributed to a Si Satchanalai kiln (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), Kalong pieces from Chiang Rai Province (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), and Buriram pieces (twelfth to early thirteenth centuries), with identification relying on modern Makruk comparison and physical stability tests of reversed pieces.