Sunday 15 March 2015

Dicing With Destiny

Benjamin Woolley takes us on a journey through the history of games from ancient times to the modern day across three episodes.

The series starts with "Dicing with Destiny" where Woolley starts by discussing the Stanway game, an ancient board game found in an ancient grave in... you guessed it, Stanway. the problem with this game was that nobody knew the rules of the game and the starting positions of the pieces were based off of how the board was found (which after about 2000 years, give or take, are of course going to be a bit sketchy).

The board was found with no indication as to how it was played so Woolley brought the game to Dr Irving Finkle, An expert in the field of ancient games at the British Museum who came to the conclusion that the game was some sort of strategy/war game or possibly a divination tool used by priests.

there was a section on a game called "Foro" which interested me. It was a card game which often included gambling, which stirred up a fuss with the church because at this time games had a lot of religious symbolism and gambling was frowned upon by the church at this time.

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