People have been playing board games for about five thousand years. The oldest sets we can put a date on come from Egypt and Mesopotamia, buried in graves alongside the people who had played them. The cultural significance of board games is easier to read than their rules. A board game is where a society puts its ideas about luck, war, money and morality into a form small enough to fit on a table, and then hands it to its children. That has not changed.
We design at-home escape room games for a living, so we came at this history sideways, looking for what has actually held up at a table across five thousand years. More of it applies to our work than we expected.
Origins of board games
Senet is the oldest game we can name with any confidence. Boards turn up in Egyptian burials from around 3100 BC, and by the New Kingdom the game had acquired a second life as a religious diagram, its squares standing in for stages of the passage into the afterlife. Tutankhamun was buried with at least four sets. A game you want with you after you die is a strong review.
The Royal Game of Ur is the other contender. Leonard Woolley pulled the boards out of the royal cemetery at Ur in the 1920s and they date to roughly 2600 BC, which would leave us with a beautiful object and no idea what to do with it, were it not for one piece of luck. In 177 BC a Babylonian scribe wrote down how the game was played in his own day, nearly two and a half thousand years after those boards went into the ground. What he recorded is a later version of the game and not the one Woolley dug up, but it is the thread that lets anybody play at all. Someone decided a games manual was worth the clay.
The game got around in the meantime. Assyrian palace guards, centuries after Ur, scratched their own boards into the stone paving where they stood watch, which is the ancient world's equivalent of a phone behind the reception desk.
In China, go is old enough that its origin story involves an emperor inventing it to teach his son discipline, which is the sort of thing a culture says about a game too old to date. Solid textual references start in the 6th century BC.
Rome left the richest trail of all. English Heritage's account of two thousand years of board games in Britain counts 689 gaming counters and 11 fragmentary gaming boards in its collection from the forts and towns along Hadrian's Wall alone. The Roman writers Varro and Ovid both mention a two-player strategy game called latrunculi, and nobody ever wrote its rules down, so we are guessing at how it went. Soldiers posted to the cold northern edge of the empire brought counters with them and scratched boards straight into stone, which is what you do when you are staying a while.
Merrills, better known now as Nine Men's Morris, arrived in Britain later and outlasted the lot of them. It appears to have started in the Mediterranean or the Middle East around five thousand years ago, though boards are uncommon in Britain before the 11th century. Through the rest of the Middle Ages it was one of the most popular games in Western Europe, and there is a 13th-century board at Wharram Percy, a Yorkshire village that has since vanished.
Evolution of board games
Chess is the clearest case of a game moving between cultures and being rewritten by each one. It starts as chaturanga in India somewhere around the 6th or 7th century AD, becomes shatranj in Persia, and reaches England after the Norman Conquest. The pieces kept getting renamed to match whoever was holding them: the Persian vizier standing beside the king became, in Europe, the queen.
Then in the late 15th century somebody changed the rules. The queen and the bishop were given their modern long-range moves, and the game sped up so violently that players of the day called the new version mad queen chess. We cannot think of a bigger single change ever made to the rules of a major game. No committee made it. It stuck because the faster version was more fun, and nobody knows who did it.
The nineteenth century is when board games in Britain and America became a way to teach children things, most of it grim. The Mansion of Happiness in 1843 moved players along a track toward heaven, with squares for idleness and cruelty sending you backward. Snakes and ladders arrived from an Indian game whose ladders were virtues and whose snakes were vices, and lost the theology on the way over. Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life in 1860 rewarded industry and punished intemperance, though it also introduced the idea that a game might be about an ordinary life instead of a war.
Our favorite story in the whole history is Lizzie Magie's. In 1904 she patented The Landlord's Game to demonstrate an economic argument: that landlords collecting rent on land they had not improved would inevitably ruin everyone else. The game ended up carrying two sets of rules, added across the decades that followed. Under one, rents were shared and every player got richer together. Under the other, a single player accumulated everything and bankrupted the table. The second set is the one people liked playing, and it is the one that became Monopoly. A game built to argue against monopolies became the best-selling board game about becoming one.
The last big shift is recent. Through the 1990s a run of German designers, Klaus Teuber's Settlers of Catan in 1995 above all, pushed the hobby away from elimination and dice-driven luck toward trading, negotiation and games that end with everyone still playing. Almost everything on a modern shelf descends from that decade.
Cultural impact of board games
You will read a lot of writing that says board games are a universal language uniting people of all backgrounds. It is a nice line, and it is too big to mean much. Something narrower is more useful: a board game is a small, cheap, portable record of what a society was worried about.
Senet worried about the afterlife. Chess worried about the shape of a feudal army, and then spent five hundred years quietly updating itself as that army changed. The Landlord's Game worried about rent. Monopoly, arriving properly in the 1930s, gave a country in a depression a way to spend an evening being ruthless with money that did not exist. Catan worried about whether you could build something without destroying the person across from you.
There is a second thing games record, which is who a society thinks should be at the table. Player elimination, the mechanic where you lose and then sit and watch for an hour, was normal for most of this history and has gone out of fashion in modern design. That is a change in manners as much as in game design. Somewhere in the last few decades it stopped being acceptable to invite six people over and then send two of them to the kitchen at 8pm.
The thing that has kept board games alive through television, home computers and phones is duller than a universal language and more durable. A board game is a socially acceptable reason to sit in a room with specific people for three hours and give them your attention. Very few other objects do that job.
Future of board games
Every few years somebody predicts that the board game is about to be absorbed into a screen. It keeps not happening, and it is worth being honest about why, instead of pretending the prediction is new.
Augmented reality tabletop games have been six months away since roughly 2016. App-driven hybrid board games arrived, sold reasonably, and then ran into the problem that a game tied to an app stops working when the app stops being maintained, which for a physical object you paid real money for is an unpleasant surprise. Meanwhile the parts of the hobby that grew fastest were the physical ones: legacy games you permanently alter as you play, cooperative games, and narrative puzzle games in boxes.
One piece of digital did stick, and it is a small one. Using a phone or laptop to check answers and dole out hints works, because it replaces a sealed envelope of solutions that people either open too early or refuse to open at all. That is the whole of the technology in our own games, and we do not expect to need more.
What five thousand years of this taught us about designing a puzzle
Here is what we did not expect to find when we started reading. Almost every ancient game on this page is for two players. Senet is two. Ur is two. Go and chess are two. Latrunculi and merrills are two.
That is not an accident of what survived. A two-player game only has to be fair. A game for six has to keep six people busy, which is a far harder problem, and it is one that mostly got solved in the last thirty years, not the last five thousand.
It happens to be the problem we spend most of our working life on. We publish the rules we design escape room puzzles by, and the one that kills more drafts than any other is that a puzzle has to survive a group. If a puzzle has one thread running through it, one person picks that thread up and solves the whole thing while everybody else watches them do it. On paper the puzzle is fine. At a table of five it is a bad twenty minutes for four people.
The ancient games solved this with dice, and we think that is the underrated invention. Randomness is what lets a strong player and a weak player sit at the same board and both stay interested to the end. It is why senet, Ur and backgammon all throw something before every single move. We do not use dice, so we have to get there another way, by building puzzles with several strands that can be worked at the same time and then combined, or with enough physical material on the table that a second and third pair of hands are actually useful.
We also keep a twenty-minute ceiling. If one puzzle holds a tester up for longer than that, we treat it as a fault in the puzzle rather than a fault in the tester. The old racing games have the same instinct built into their shape. A round is short, you play several, and the evening is made of small complete things instead of one long grind.
If you would rather try that than read about it, our free Puzzle Archive is open in your browser right now. Fifteen puzzles graded from introductory to expert, tiered hints when you want them, and a box to type your answer into so you know whether you have it. Ten of them are also available as free printable escape room puzzles if you would rather work on paper.
And if five thousand years of people sitting across a board from each other has left you wanting to do it yourself, that is what we make. Our at-home escape room games run 1 to 6 players and two to four hours. Our current best seller is The Fifth Column: Manhattan, June 1945, and you are stopping a Nazi plot after Germany has already surrendered. 1 to 6 players, 2 to 4+ hours across two parts, ages 14+, 4.9 stars from 151 reviews.
Common questions
These come up most often from people who arrive here after reading about one particular ancient game and wanting the wider picture.
What is the oldest board game?
Senet, from Egypt, is the oldest game we can identify with confidence, with boards found in burials dating to around 3100 BC. The Royal Game of Ur from Mesopotamia is close behind at roughly 2600 BC, and it has the distinction of being the oldest game whose rules we can actually reconstruct, thanks to a Babylonian clay tablet from 177 BC that records how it was played then.
How old are board games?
About five thousand years, on the surviving physical evidence. That is a floor rather than a ceiling, because a board scratched into dirt or drawn on cloth leaves nothing behind, so the games we can date are the ones somebody was rich enough to make out of wood, stone or ivory.
Why are board games culturally significant?
Because a game is a compact record of what the people who made it cared about and feared. Senet encoded Egyptian ideas about the afterlife, chess kept rewriting its pieces to match changing European power, and Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game was designed in 1904 to make an argument about rent before it was reworked into Monopoly. Games also record who a society thinks belongs at the table, which is why player elimination has gone out of fashion in modern design.
Are board games more popular now than they used to be?
The hobby end of the category has grown enormously since the mid 1990s, when a wave of German designs led by Settlers of Catan moved games away from luck and elimination. What has not changed is the underlying appeal. A board game is a reason to sit down with specific people for a few hours and pay attention to them.
What was the first modern board game?
There is no clean answer, but two candidates matter. Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life in 1860 introduced the idea that a game could be about an ordinary life rather than a battle. Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game in 1904 introduced the property-trading system that almost every commercial board game of the following century borrowed from.
