found by Sir
Leonard Woolley in the
Royal Cemetery at Ur, now held in the
British Museum, dated to |alt=One of the five game boards for Royal Game of Ur found by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, now held in the British Museum, dated to c. 2500 BCE The history of game boards is a topic closely related to
history of board games. However, not all games classified as board games actually feature game boards. While game boards would seem to be a
necessary and sufficient condition of the
genre,
card games that do not use a standard deck of cards (as well as games that use neither cards nor a game board) are often colloquially included, with some scholars therefore referring to said genre as that of "table and board games" or "
tabletop games". According to
Gary O. Rollefson and
St John Simpson, the oldest known game boards date to
Neolithic dwellings as old as ~6990
BCE (
Beidha) and ~5870 BCE (
ʿAin Ghazal). They were made from durable materials like
limestone, and are likely related to
mancala-style games. Very few if any similar objects have been found in the archeological evidence from sites linked to the Neolithic and
Bronze Age eras (one artifact resembling a
chess board, dated to c. 3500 BCE from
Tell Majnuna site in Syria, exists, although it might have been a proto-calculator). The next generation of artifacts more universally acknowledged as game boards, also more complex than the possible mancala-styled boards, are dated to the
Early Bronze Age period around the
Mediterranean and include those for Egyptian
senet and
mehen from ~3000 - 2000 BCE and similar ones from
Mesopotamia (
Fertile Crescent region). The
Royal Game of Ur from c. 2500 BCE has often been called one of the oldest board games. Fragments of game boards for unidentified board games, made from
terracotta and stone, have also been found at sites related to the
Indus Valley Civilization of similar age. Texts referring to the origins of
chess date from the beginning of the seventh century., a modern (2012) game|alt=Game board with initial setup for Indigo, a modern (2012) gameEarly game boards came in a variety of shapes (for example, senet's game board was made of three parallel rows, while mehen's was based on a spiral form); a
quadrilateral (square) shape with grids became common only later, with the emergence of
strategy games. Board games made in the early 1800s started to feature maps of real locations (ex. ''Walker's Tour of France'' from 1815).
Avalon Hill's
wargame PanzerBlitz from 1970 was the first game to include a
geomorphic map which allowed players to reconfigure sections of the game board, an innovation that became reused on many later titles. == Characteristics ==