The oldest "tabletops" appeared more than five thousand years ago and passed an interesting path of development, which, experts are sure, has not yet ended.

What the Ancients Played

The first board games appeared in India, China and Mesopotamia. Players who gathered at the table simply threw dice, pebbles with drawings or some semblance of cubes on a hard surface, and the winner was the one who scored the most points. Some games have not survived to this day, although they are repeatedly mentioned in historical sources.

For example, ancient Egyptiansenet, reminiscent of modern checkers. Sets for him were found and are found in the tombs of the pharaohs, apparently, they were left there so that the deceased would not be so bored in the realm of the dead. Here's the thing. Backgammon, invented in the Middle East, are still alive today. In ancient China, there were unique variations on a theme like lyubo - a cross between gambling and divination. And the prototype of the modern domino appeared in India at the end of the 1st millennium, and from there, apparently, chess originates.

Indian Gamechapuris mentioned in the ancient epic "Mahabharata", and the finale of the game there affects the fate of states and their rulers. According to legend, one of the Indian emperors loved this entertainment so much that he laid out a huge playing field of red and white marble in front of his palace. Beautiful concubines from the harem moved through the cages, they were the living "figures".

As for dominos, although colored plates with dots appeared in the East, in Asia, however, the modern form of the game acquired in Europe, and received its name in honor of the Dominican monks (they, by the way, wore white cloaks with black hoods). They were forbidden to play cards, but dominoes in Catholic monasteries were allowed.

Board games spread rapidly across Asia, in each country acquiring specific features and a variety of options. On the basis of knuckles alone in China, at least fifty of the most diverse games were invented.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas were not far behind. The Incas and Mayans also loved dice, but, in addition, invented numerous strategy games, mainly on the theme of hunting, sometimes war. The plots of their games are impressive – for example, on a small piece of land, a real battle was played out between two sides on the back of a giant serpent.

They did not shy away from games with knuckles in Europe, but there is very little information about them. Researchers got to the bottom of the original Scandinavian game calledhneftafl- This is the same "checkers" family, only the arrangements on the square field were not symmetrical, which made the game more intricate. From Iceland, Greenland and England, thanks to the Vikings, this entertainment fell even into Kievan Rus and appears in the chronicles under the name "tavlei".

Medieval "tabletops"

As time went on, games became more difficult. The monochromatic chessboard became black and white, the moves of the opponents changed, new pieces appeared. By the way, the rules of classical chess from the XII century practically did not change, and checkers were established around the same time.

A new turn occurs in the XIII-XIV centuries - from Egypt to Europe get playing cards. The variety of decks then struck the imagination, but, interestingly, spiritual leaders immediately disliked the cards and tried to ban them. As, indeed, and other board games. Only checkers were not subject to sanctions - for some reason everyone considered them harmless. As for card heroes – ladies, jacks, kings – at one time they were portrayed as famous historical characters like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. The games themselves existed at least fifty.

Later, in the XVIII-XIX centuries, cardboard games came into vogue. This is not about classic maps, but about the situation depicted on the field, whether it is the crossing of difficult terrain or, say, the siege of a fortress by cardboard soldiers. So gradually formed lotto, gusek, as well as real thematic works of game art like "Storming of Ishmael" or "Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow". Such entertainment was popular with both gentlemen and ladies, chips, fields and beautiful cards were printed in printing houses, at one time it was generally believed that such an interpretation of famous battles contributes to the patriotic education of young people.

Of the fundamentally new games that appeared in the XIX century, you can recall and Reversi, which originated in the UK, enjoyed success for a couple of decades, then turned out to be forgotten and experienced a new round of popularity already in the twentieth century (and continues to be in demand now).

At the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, mahjong gained widespread popularity, invented not only by officers of the Chinese army, not by some nobleman from the vicinity of Shanghai. At first, the game was known only in the suburbs of Beijing, but by 1920 it had gained wild popularity and became almost a national symbol of Chinese culture, and not only in China itself, but also, of course, in Europe and America.

The boom of the XX century

In the twentieth century, the hobby for board games became rampant, and they themselves turned into a separate direction with a rich design, carefully thought-out legend and an atmosphere that can capture the attention of all those present.

In 1934, during the Great Depression, an unemployed man named Charles Darrow of Pennsylvania came up with the project for the famous Monopoly. Publishers rejected his application, but Darrow did not give up and released the game on his own, producing about 5,000 copies. The demand turned out to be incredible - next year Monopoly became the best-selling game in America, and today it entertains a good half a billion inhabitants of the Earth, including at commercial competitions with impressive prize pools.

Scrabble is another game that owes its appearance to the Great Depression. It was invented in 1938 by unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts.

Then more and more commercial games poured into the world market as if from a cornucopia: "Dungeons and Dragons", "Mascot"(this game was the first to be decorated in the style of fantasy),Magic: The Gathering. "Colonizers" by Klaus Teuber was released in 1995 and became the first in a series of games in the German style (see sidebar below), and "Power Grid", which was released in 2004, became both an economic strategy and a game to occupy the territory at the same time. A real boom of "tabletops" began - with the creation of fan clubs for interests and the replication of collectible cards, which cost fabulous money. Most of these games appeared abroad, but, for example, the legendary "Mafia" was invented in 1986 by students of Moscow State University, and only then it won, if not the whole world, then a fair part of it.