History of Games

Imran's History of Games

This page is a collection of resources related to the history of games, primarily board games.

I'm currently working on:

Documenting pachisi variants.

Writing a comprehensive bibliography for Mancala variants.

Feel free to contact me at imran@ghory.org if you have any comments or suggestions.

Tables

History of Backgammon (note this is a first draft, and more a collection of my notes with some coherence added, and I plan to rewrite much of it when I have doen some more research).
Tables in English Literature, my analysis of pre-1850 works produced in England which refer to Tables variants.
Chronology of Backgammon in England, a chronology of Backgammon and Tables.
Notes on Murray, Murray's History of Chess contains a huge amount of incidental information on Tables variants these are my rough notes on that information.
Identifying Tables (incomplete), a page based around a criteria I developed to see if games similar to Tables are related.

Chess

The Butrint chess piece
Commentery on Sam Sloan's Origin of Chess
The history and origin of Chess

Cards

Dating period card games (work in progress), a page identifying the earliest english languages references to period card games.
Notes on card games, various interesting notes I made while researching the above.
Lists of card games, listing lists of card games in literature.
Primero according to Nares glossary.

Pachisi

The Pachisi-Patolli theory, papers on the relationship between Pachisi and Patolli.

Usefull external links

http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/bckg/english.htm