Boredom-Busting Facts About Board Games

By Emily Goodman

1 WE HAVE been playing board games in some cases, the same board games for millennia. Chess, checkers, backgammon and Go all have origins in the ancient world. King Tut was buried with multiple sets of an Egyptian game called senet. Ajax and Achilles still appear hunched over a board in the midst of play on hundreds of pieces of Greek pottery. And the Ashanti people of Ghana are believed to have created a board game called wari, which you may know as mancala.

2 IT WASN'T until the 19th century that board games began to be sold commercially. The first, Mansion of Happiness, came out in England in 1800. The 'mansion' was heaven, and players raced to get there. Decades later, Milton Bradley reworked-and rebranded it as The Checkered Game of Life. It was the only board game Bradley personally worked on.

3 ANOTHER POPULAR racing game, Parcheesi, has roots 3 in ancient India, where it was called pachisi, from the Hindi word for 'twenty-five', the highest possible outcome of a single throw. But whereas Americans only tweaked the name, the Brits decided to call it Ludo ('lew-doh), Latin for 'I play. So when Englishman Anthony E. Pratt developed his murder-mystery board game in 1943, he called it Cluedo, playing on Ludo.

4 IN INTERNATIONAL versions of Cluedo, the colourful cast can look quite different from the US version. Professor Plum was originally called Dr Orange in Spain. Mr Green goes by Chef Lettuce in Chile. Mrs Peacock is Mrs Purple in Brazil and Mrs Periwinkle in France and in Switzerland, she's Captain Blue, a man.