Wonderful Old Games Are Wonderful!

What do you think about when someone mentions "Old Games"? Do you think about your childhood and those games that you used to play with your family and friends, games such as "hide or seek" or tag? Other people might recall some special types of sports games or tournaments that were played in years gone by. In this particular article we will be focusing on the classic card and board games, and providing a bit of background history of these games...

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 are those games that have stood the test of time, and are just as popular today as they were years ago. Risk and Battleship are two examples of such games. Other examples are: Life, Clue, Monopoly and Sorry. Minor adjustments may have been made to these games over the years (such as the introduction of online game play), but the basic rules and strategy and game play remains the same.

Old games that revolve around a pack of cards have been around for years and years. It is not known when the first deck of cards appeared on the scene, but it's very likely that the Chinese invented them between the 7th and 10th centuries A.D. It was around this time that they started to shuffle money around.

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.