all right well welcome back uh we're gonna begin kind of starting the lecture material for uh week two here and the week in general the outline of the whole week is focused on uh history to kind of give you a bit of background um backdrop to kind of what we're going to be doing the gaming in general relies on a lot of histories so we'll focus each of the three kind of lecture chunks will focus on a different type of gaming and the history behind that so i'm going to start with board gaming history and so i've divided board game history up into three mini lectures one on ancient board game history classic and modern those divisions are somewhat arbitrary uh yeah somewhat arbitrary as you'll see and are basically marked in my mind by significant advances in the field i think it sounds like it's it's really really serious thing but um kind of breakthrough moments as it were in board gaming if you want to call them those kinds of things so ancient history is going to be anything um up until basically uh early 1900's uh so lots of lots of time there and then i'll talk about classic and modern later hopefully you'll begin you'll see you'll understand why i actually picked picked these uh particular divisions for these things so when it comes to ancient history earliest board games earliest games that we know of may have existed as early as 5000 bc based on the findings of some dice that we found but the first real game that we're sure of as an actual game the earliest records of it are 3100 bc games of some sort probably existed before this but this is the first one we don't know the rules for it though developed in egypt and found in some tombs of some of the pharaohs and those things called senate and so here you can see on the on the screen a complete case of this particular game the game was played on the board and then the boards were actually the pieces were then stored in this little drawer inside the board don't really know what it was about probably related somehow to the gods in the afterlife or something like that but not entirely sure another game that existed uh early thousands bc how we call hounds and jackals if any of you have watched uh the old um charlton heston movie the ten commandments there's actually they're playing a version of what we think might be hounds and jackals uh in the game you can skin screenshot of that movie here and they've got these long these long figurines here um uh that are hounds and jackals and so we have we think we have some idea of how it's played but not not entirely sure uh here's the way the actual looks like so surprisingly enough this movie that was made the ten commandments is based on um a real game that actually existed in uh around 2000 bc maybe even before that so pretty cool so that's the earliest we know there are a few others uh from around that time again egyptian game called mehen which is something kind of like a racing game we think uh where the you can see kind of the spiraling tale of the snake and the idea would be that the player tokens or pieces kind of race each other around the spiral perhaps again not entirely sure about this but um so the earliest game that we know where we actually still have a complete set of rules is uh called the royal game of er and about 2650 bc and so if you can make a case that this is humanity's longest running game and it's played somewhat similar to backgammon and the reason we know the rules is because someone actually wrote down the rules on a cuneiform tablet that was discovered the tablet wasn't written in the 1980s the tablet was discovered in the 1980s and deciphered and translated and so we know how this game was played and it's still uh there are people who will who can still play this game and do play this game so that's pretty cool all right so backgammon is another game that's um pretty pretty old uh some of you may just think of it as isn't that a game that like my grandparents paid it played or something like that well it goes much much further back than that uh it got that modern name of that gammon in 1645 and there was actually an international tournament established in 1963 but the rules in the existence of the game in its rough form uh stretch way back before that 2000 bc you can see here if you if you've ever seen a backgammon board you know those kind of triangle kind of shapes that are typical of it you can actually see the triangle shapes here on this board this board is not in super great shape but you can begin to see kind of where that's coming from so that's been around for a while um it wasn't just egypt though and rome and those kinds of things games have been all over the world so um go is a really long really popular game in china that we know of existed at least around 400 bc very abstract games so here's a a scroll with a bunch of people around the go table but the way that the grain of the game is played basically is that you take turns placing white or black pieces here and the idea is to surround the largest area and eliminate your opponent and it's an incredibly complex game and if you're interested in learning it more complex than chess or something like that and it's been calculated that there are uh this is your more possible moves than there are the number of atoms in the universe so that's that's complexity for you so very popular very popular game long running people take go games very seriously sometimes states and ladders is another game that's been around for a long time originated in india as far as we know around 200 bc and so it was started as a morality game about good and evil and you can you can see here some of these the black snakes on this uh on this board here and it was modified to the slightly more child-friendly version of this perhaps uh in 1943 where it kind of hit the mass market so hopefully the you can begin to see now right we're talking about games that we're getting we're all over the globe right so games have been around for a really long time and a part of all kinds of different cultures it's a kind of almost a shared language in some sense amongst all kinds of cultures which is really really cool so one of the most well-known ancient games if you want to call it ancient would be chess and so there's there's actually quite a bit of discussion about when does chess actually start and the reason for that well here maybe i'll perhaps i'll explain it so uh so about 400 or 600 a.d there's this this viking game called taffle and you can see see what that looks like here uh where essentially you have one group in the middle that is outnumbered by this group on the outside and they have to make very regimented kinds of moves right if you're familiar with chess you you uh you know that like each of the different pieces in chess makes very uh regimented moves so the pawns can only move one space forward but there's a few exceptions to that right but bishops can only move diagonally uh rooks can only move uh orthogonally or in straight lines in one direction or the other right so there's there's a standardized movement for each kind of piece and so you see some of that here and some of that kind of movement in taffle and something like this was taken and adapted into an indian version of a game called chaturanga where again you can see if you know anything about chess right you can already see here these pieces look very similar to what we might expect to see in chessboard here but here there's actually four different groups as opposed to the classic two that we are we're used to um there is this was taken to persia when the persian empire expanded uh and uh turned into a game called chatrange and i think i don't actually know how to pronounce these things so i'm making this up as i go along but hey just go with um and so there's some debate as to how much influence these particular games had on the modern version of chess and so i'm not interested in that not going to go into that but essentially chess more or less gets codified in its current form in around 1475 when there's a set of european rules that kind of changes it to what the modern form that we know of as chess and in 1851 there's an international international tournament established around chess and so chess has gone on to all kinds of things um all kinds of gaudy crazy things so what what you have here this is as far as as far as i can tell i think this is the most expensive chess uh set in the world right now uh you can buy this for four million dollars and uh here i'll show you i'll show you what this looks like so uh what you're seeing here the the kind of silvery or white looking stuff is 18 karat white gold but then you can also see those massive pearls on top of the ponds and then there's a whole bunch of blue sapphires and diamonds the most of the white sparkly stuff is diamonds so it's an incredibly expensive um set of chess that is i think it's currently listed at four million dollars so yeah pretty pretty crazy uh along the way uh what i would classify as other also kind of ancient games that you may not know of right or you may have heard of or played versions of mancala so you can see a version of that an early version of that here checkers is a really old game um the romans were playing hopscotch as kind of a children's game for a long time mahjong domino's another series of games that kind of have been around for for quite some time as well so some of these games that you've probably heard of maybe some of you played them have been around for a really long time um and but there's not a whole lot of innovation and so on and so forth around gaming to become kind of what we consider now to be modern board gaming and so i'm gonna this is kind of where the um i'm gonna end kind of ancient board gaming basically and we're going to move into what i would call kind of classic era which i will i'll talk about in the next video here