Random Board Game Recommendation

What this list is for

Your shelf holds the same four games and you play two of them. Somebody has to break the habit, and it will not be you, because you like those two.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• Acquire
• Agricola
• 18XX
• Adel Verpflichtet
• Afrikan tähti
• Aksharit
• Yut
• Yahtzee

Some of those were designed by a named person in the last twenty years. One of them is a Finnish treasure hunt from the 1950s. One is Korean and nobody knows who made it. Yut is played at Lunar New Year and has been played for longer than anybody has been counting, which is the ordinary condition of a board game and the thing this page is about.

Drawing a game

1. Press Generate for one title, then go and read what it is before you dismiss it.
2. Ask for five to build a list of things to borrow, not buy.
3. Type into Contains to search titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these titles come from

Board games gathered and checked by hand, from modern designer games to traditional ones played across the world for centuries. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The oldest game you can still sit down and play

Between 1922 and 1934, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug at the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. Among the graves he found five game boards, inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli, made somewhere between 2600 and 2400 BC.

Put that in order. These boards were buried around four and a half thousand years ago. They are older than the pyramids at Giza are to the Romans. Whoever played on them lived closer in time to the invention of writing than to the birth of Christ.

Woolley had the boards. He had the pieces. He had the dice, which were tetrahedral, little pyramids. What he did not have, and what nobody had, was the faintest idea how the game was played. A board with twenty squares and seven counters a side tells you almost nothing. You can look at a chessboard for a lifetime and never derive chess from it.

So for about sixty years the oldest board game in the world sat in a museum, complete, beautiful, and unplayable.

A tablet, a scribe, and a man in a museum

Around the year 177 BC, a Babylonian scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu pressed a stylus into wet clay and wrote out, among other things, the rules of a game.

He was not preserving anything. The game was popular. He was writing down how it worked, the way you might write out the rules of a card game for a nephew. Then the clay dried, and the centuries went over it, and eventually the tablet ended up in the British Museum along with roughly a hundred and thirty thousand others.

In the early 1980s, a curator and Assyriologist called Irving Finkel, who reads cuneiform the way you read this sentence, worked out what the tablet was describing. It was the game from the boards. A race, two players, seven pieces each, the dice deciding how far you move and the rosettes on the board marking squares where you are safe.

There is a second tablet. It was photographed in a studio in Paris, and then it was destroyed during the Second World War, and the photograph sat unremarked for fifty years until Finkel recognised what was in it.

So the chain runs like this. Someone played the game. Two thousand four hundred years later, a scribe wrote down how. Two thousand one hundred years after that, a man in London read what the scribe wrote, and now you can buy a copy in the museum shop and beat your brother at it.

Finkel is honest that some of it is reconstruction. The tablet is partial, the routing of the pieces is not fully specified, and a few scholars think the resulting game is duller than it should be. What is not in doubt is that we have the oldest written rules for anything, and they are the rules of a game.

Bored guards scratched it into a palace wall

Copies of the board have been dug up in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Cyprus, Crete and Sri Lanka. It travelled everywhere, for three thousand years, without a publisher or a marketing budget.

The best of them is not in a grave. At Khorsabad, in Assyria, somebody scratched the board into the limestone of a palace gateway. Archaeologists think it was the guards, cutting a game into the doorway they were supposed to be watching, because a shift is long and a doorway does not need watching every minute of it.

Four thousand years ago somebody was bored at work and scratched a game into the furniture. Nothing about that requires translation.

Why games outlive the people who play them

Consider what has to survive for a game to reach us. Not the boards, which rot. Not the players, obviously. What survives is the rules, and rules are the cheapest thing to carry. A game is a set of instructions that can live in a head, be spoken across a table, and be reconstructed anywhere there is a flat surface and something to move.

Empires fell over the top of the Game of Ur and it kept being played. The language it was first taught in went extinct. The gods it was played in front of were forgotten. The city it is named after is a mound in a desert. The game outlived all of it, and it lost only when nobody bothered to teach a child.

That is what is sitting in the list above. The Finnish game about a star in Africa, the Korean game with the throwing sticks, the German game about medieval collectors, the American one about hotel mergers. Somebody made each of them, and every one of them will last precisely as long as somebody keeps explaining it to somebody else.

So play the one it gives you, and teach it to someone. That is the entire preservation mechanism. It has never been anything else.

Questions people ask

Is the Game of Ur really the oldest board game?

It is the oldest one we can still play, which is a different and better claim. Senet, from Egypt, is roughly as old and possibly older, but nobody wrote its rules down, so what you see reconstructed is educated guesswork.

Does it matter that old games are so heavily based on luck?

It tells you what they were for. A game that turns on the dice can be played across a gap in skill, or in status, or in age, and everybody has a chance. That is a feature in a world where you play with whoever is in the room.

How do I get a group to try an unfamiliar game?

Do not explain it. Set it up, give everyone their pieces, and teach the first turn only. People learn games by playing a bad first round, not by listening to somebody read a rulebook aloud at them.

Are traditional games worth playing next to modern designer ones?

They have been playtested by more people than any modern game ever will be. That is not a guarantee of quality, but it is a serious recommendation, and it is free.

References

1. British Museum, Top 10 historical board games, on the Royal Game of Ur and Finkel's decipherment of the rules. https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/top-10-historical-board-games
2. Royal Game of Ur, on Woolley's excavation, the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balatu, and the spread of the board across the ancient world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur
3. Browne, C. et al. Modern Techniques for Ancient Games, on the two tablets, one destroyed in wartime Paris and recognised half a century later from a photograph. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10066