Games Day

What the day is

Games Day is observed on December 20, landing conveniently in the week when households are stuck indoors together with time to fill.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. Board games themselves are among the older surviving human artifacts. Senet boards were buried with Egyptians five thousand years ago. Go has been played for roughly two and a half millennia and is still unsolved. Mancala games spread across Africa and Asia in countless local forms.

The best story belongs to the Royal Game of Ur, a board from Mesopotamia found in a royal cemetery and dated to around 2600 BCE. Nobody knew how it was played until a curator at the British Museum recognized that a much later cuneiform tablet in the same collection recorded the rules. The game was reconstructed from a clay tablet and can now be played again, having been out of use for something like two thousand years.

The most instructive modern example is Monopoly, whose real origin is almost the reverse of its reputation. It descends from The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie, who designed it to demonstrate how landlords accumulating property impoverish everyone else. It was intended as an argument against concentrated land ownership. Decades later a version was sold to a major publisher as an original invention, and the anti-monopoly teaching tool became the definitive game about bankrupting your family.

The current renaissance in board games came largely from Germany, where designers favored short playing times, meaningful decisions, little dependence on luck and, crucially, no player elimination, so nobody spends an hour watching.

How to take part

• Play something from the cupboard that has not been opened in years.
• Try a modern design if your image of board games stopped at the 1980s.
• Teach the rules by playing an open first round rather than reading the booklet aloud.
• Choose games nobody gets knocked out of when children are playing.
• Look up the Royal Game of Ur, whose rules are freely available and genuinely good.