“Old Games” is a concept that brings up different things to different people. What do you think when you hear these words? Some people think of special old tournaments or sports games that were played in years gone by. Others think of those childhood games that they used to play with their friends and family members…games like tag or “hide and seek”. In this article we will be zeroing in on the classic board and card games that were popular years ago (and are still played today). We will be providing a history to these games, and some trivia about them as well.
Board games are, naturally enough, games that are played on a board of some sort. They are amongst the oldest of games, with the first game in this category being the Egyptian game of Senet (which existed around 3500 B.C.). As the years past, board games started to evolve into Europe as the various cultures started to embrace the concept of the board game. With today’s advances in advertising, there are a lot of various board games that families can play. The latest “version” of these boar games is the “online play” version, where you can basically play the same game, but online, with someone who is often on the other side of the world.
We will first examine the world of strategy games. What is a strategy game? It is a game that involves a good strategy in order to win. Chess and checkers are both strategy games. Games such as Chutes and Ladders and Sorry are luck games, games that require only a good “roll of the dice” (a bit of luck) in order to win. Many games require a bit of both luck and strategy to win. Games such as Risk or Monopoly are good examples. One thing to keep in mind…if you don’t have a good strategy, no amount of “luck” will pay off…
Classic board games have been around for a long, long time… They have stood the test of time, and although they were popular generations ago, they are still popular today. Two examples of these games are Battleship and Risk. Minor adjustments to these games have been made over the years (such as the introduction of online play), but the games till have the same basic strategy and game play that they started out with years ago. Other examples of these types of games are Monopoly, Clue, Life, and Sorry.
People have been playing “old games” with cards for centuries. While the exact origin of a deck of cards is not known, it is very likely that they were invented by the Chinese around the time that they started shuffling paper money around. This would be between the 7th and 10th centuries A.D.
Around the time of the 15th century the format of the English playing cards started to appear. Documentation tells us that in an English Act of Parliament, domestic card makers were complaining that their profits were being cut by the importation of foreign cards into their markets.
Playing cards were originally both created by hand and painted by hand. This was very time and labor intensive, and meant that a deck of cards were very expensive to purchase. Since few people owned them, few people got to play card games. Popular old card games of this time period were: hearts, bridge, poker, and rummy.
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