Notes on Games Britannia: Dicing With Destiny

Recently we've been watching a BBC series called Games Britannia, which was published back in 2009. The series follows Benjamin Woolley as he travels much of Britain and some of the world in his attempt to understand the history of games.

Woolley believes that games are a strong source of social, political and even religious history for our nation. The first episode centres on ancient games and leads towards games of the industrial revolution, marking various important points of gaming history in between.

The first game that is examined is a mysterious iron age game now called "The Stanway Game". Woolley speculates that the fact that it was buried with an important spiritual figure indicates that it could have been used for divining purposes to the ancient Britons.

Woolley's other investigations of ancient games with religious significance include Moksha Patamu (which has since been commercialised into Snakes & Ladders), a game about the Hindu path of enlightenment, as well as an early medieval game called Alea Evangelii.

Alea Evangelii (Game of the Gospels) is a form of an early Scandinavian game called tafl or hnefatafl, in which two armies are present on the board, with one outweighing the other in terms of numbers. Both hnefatafl and Alea Evangelii feature a king in the centre of the board, who must attempt to escape to a board edge. He has a smaller number of defending forces than the attackers who begin on all four edges of the board. The main difference between hnefatafl and Alea Evangelii is that the latter has great spiritual significance due to its Christian scripture context.

With brief mention of other games which became popular in early medieval history (such as chess, backgammon & draughts) he then goes on to talk about 9 Men's Morris. He presents some examples of the gameboard having been carved into the stone in cathedrals by bored church-goers and then goes on to briefly explain how the game is played.

I was in Norwich recently and decided to do a little investigating myself and managed to find what I believe is a variation on the typical 9 Men's Morris layout:

Possible Nine Men's Morris carving found in Norwich Cathedral

Before long, games turned away from being tools for divination and spiritual guidance and instead became a vessel for gambling. This began in the middle ages and continued all the way until the Victorian era where games began to be presented a method of instilling morals and teaching lessons to their players.

It was in Victorian times that games began to become commercialised and companies would print them in large runs, this was of political and social importance because it could then become widespread and therefore present a message or ideal to a large number of people.

The episode ended on an examination of chess and the way in which the game has developed over the ages, including its extreme popularity in tournaments around the world.

Dicing With Destiny gave a brief but in-depth overview of the history of our games, and how they've developed to suit the times. I find it no small coincidence that games were more spiritually guided in a time when religion was the major political power in the world, and that this side of games dispersed as society developed. As society and it's politics shift, so did the games that people were playing, and the reasons they had for playing them.