The Games Room

Ancient board games — their true histories, free to read; their boards, alive on the page and printed for your table.

Some of the games in this room are five thousand years old. Some were carved into cloister benches by monks with a free hour, or buried in a king's ship, or scratched in the sand of a Cairo street. Every game here is a real one, with a real history — and every history is labelled the honest way:

Documented means the rules survive — written down by someone who played, or carried unbroken by people who never stopped. Reconstructed means the board survived but the rulebook did not, and what we play has been rebuilt from evidence; the game's own page names the evidence. A game whose rules are truly lost gets a history and no invented rules, ever.

Each game's page holds its history, its rules plainly, and the living board itself, to play against the school or against a friend. Print packs of the games — the boards and cards as PDFs, for counters and a real table — are being prepared for the shop.

Still being set up

More boards are being prepared for the room: Latrunculi, the soldiers' game of Rome; Shatranj, the ancestor of chess; Pachisi and Patolli, the race games of India and Mexico; Puluc, the running fight of the Maya highlands; Daldos, the sailors' game of Scandinavia; and Terni Lapilli, the three-in-a-row scratched on Roman steps. Two more — China's Liubo and Egypt's Mehen, the coiled snake — have histories to read and rules that are honestly lost; they will hang in the room as stories, never as inventions.