The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, Go, Chess – these are the titans of ancient gaming, monumental artifacts of human intellect and culture. But what about the other games? The games played not just by kings and emperors, but by merchants, herders, and children in villages from Africa to India? For every famous game, a dozen others have been lost to time.
Thanks to the work of pioneering historians like R. C. Bell, who dedicated their lives to cataloging these forgotten pastimes, we can rediscover a world of games, each with a unique story to tell. Let’s explore a few of these hidden gems.
The Hyena Game: A Spiral Race Across the Desert
While the Egyptians raced their souls to the afterlife in Senet, children in North Africa and Sudan were racing their “mother” and “children” pieces to the village well, all while being pursued by a hungry hyena.
The Hyena Game (known as Lupus Ludus to the Romans) is a captivating race game played on a distinctive spiral board. The goal is simple: get your pieces from the outer starting square to the safety of the “well” at the board’s center. What makes it unique is the narrative. One special piece, the “hyena,” starts near the well and moves to hunt the other pieces, sending them back to the start. It transforms a simple race into a tense story of pursuit and escape, showcasing how ancient cultures wove their folklore and daily life directly into their games.
Alquerque: The Forefather of Checkers
Every person who has ever played a game of Checkers (or Draughts) is playing a direct descendant of Alquerque. This game of pure strategy originated in the Middle East and was introduced to Europe by the Moors, famously appearing in the 13th-century “Libro de los juegos” (“Book of Games”) commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile.
The board looks like a modern Tic-Tac-Toe grid, but with extra diagonal lines connecting the points. The rules are immediately familiar: two players start with their pieces on opposite sides of the board. A piece moves one space along any marked line to an empty point. Captures are made by hopping over an adjacent enemy piece into the empty space directly beyond it. Alquerque is a pivotal link in game history, the crucial evolutionary step between simple blocking games and the complex capture-based strategy of modern Checkers.
Wari and the Mancala Family: The Art of Sowing
Not all games are about racing or direct conflict. The Mancala family of games, among the oldest and most popular in Africa and parts of Asia, is a game of “sowing” and “counting.”
Using a simple board with two or four rows of hollowed-out pits, players take turns in a ritualistic process. A player scoops up all the “seeds” (stones, shells, or actual seeds) from one of their pits and “sows” them one by one into the subsequent pits around the board. The objective is to capture seeds by landing your final sown seed in a specific location, allowing you to collect the contents of an opponent’s pit. Wari, one of the most famous Mancala variants, is a game of pure calculation and planning, requiring players to think many moves ahead to set up chain reactions and fruitful captures. It is a mathematical and meditative art form, played for centuries.
A World of Games
These three examples are just a glimpse into the vast, rich tapestry of global game history. For every Hnefatafl, there is a “Fox and Geese.” For every game of Go, there is an Indian race game like “Pachisi” that would eventually evolve into the Ludo boards in modern homes. The work of historians like R. C. Bell reminds us that the human impulse to play, to strategize, and to tell stories through games is a universal constant, connecting us all in a shared heritage of friendly competition.