Tables Games

As I've noted, my commonplace book of a blog has become more of a diary than an actual commonplace book.  That function, gathering together useful bits of information, has been taken over by Google Drive.  I really like Google Drive.

But in looking back on my posts (both of them) I saw that I had started talking about backgammon and tables games and never really finished.  I have finished.  I've compiled a bunch of references and learned quite a lot about tables games in the Middle Ages.  Long before playing cards make their appearance in the 14th Century and become wildly popular in the 15th tables games were cock of the walk.  Chess, being entirely based on skill, was popular primarily with the upper classes.  Dice, being entirely based on luck (unless you were cheating), was popular primarily with the lower classes.  The relative costs of the gaming equipment required helped to cement this. Tables games, on the third hand, combined elements of chance and skill in varying degrees and were wildly popular with both segments of the population.

I've compiled the rules for 19 distinct tables games (which includes Backgammon) and an additional 5 variations on those games.  My list is by no means exhaustive but I think I've hit on the more common games and variants for which rules are available.  Rather than type everything out, again, I'm just going to point you to the booklet I prepared:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15SAMYZtejMV3VVNllCME95U2M/view?usp=sharing

And now I'll offer some random comments:

-Although it seems strange, I really like the games that allow you to declare your rolls rather than actually rolling dice.  While this eliminates chance from the game, it's very interesting to occasionally play tables games as exercises in pure skill.

-I was fascinated to discover that people would set up tables game problems, like chess or go problems, and then wager that people couldn't solve the problems.  These were, again, pure skill puzzles and trying to understand and solve them seems like an exercise in touching the middle ages.

-Although the booklet doesn't cover game boards, I think finding the wide variety of gameboards out there was one of the bigger pleasures of my research.  They varied from humble scratchings on wood and ivory to massively inlaid treasures.  The variations in design were also interesting to see.

-The sheer variety of games, and the complexity of the rules, was astounding.  The booklet was less an attempt to share my research than it was to make a document I could refer to in order to refresh my memory when I wanted to play a game.  In looking at these games, and early playing card games, I am struck by how much time the players must have been taking.  In general it seems that the idea of a quick game was known but not entirely popular.

-Fallas threw me for a loop.  I didn't understand it at all until I realized it's a game that's played to not lose rather than to win.  I've never played a game of this that ended with someone getting all their pieces off the board.  Positioning yourself to have lots of moves, and to take away your opponent's ability to move, is the object of the game and players who realize this tend to win.

-I *REALLY* want to find a documented game from the Islamic Middle Ages. We know the game was played (my favorite reference is a poet establishing his bad-boy cred by boasting about how he whiles away the days of Ramadan playing tables games) but we don't know the exact rules of any of the games they played.  I used two modern games with long established (18th Century) roots and one game I made up by using common rules and a starting position found in a 14th Century Persian illustration.