page_title: History of games
section_title: Commercial board games
hierarchical_section_title: History of games / Modern games / Commercial board games
caption_attribution_description: English: Gyan Chaupar, Late 18th Century Jain game board on cloth in the decorative arts gallery of the National Museum, India. Acc. No. 85.312
context_page_description: The history of games dates to the ancient human past. Games are an integral part of all cultures and are one of the oldest forms of human social interaction. Games are formalized expressions of play which allow people to go beyond immediate imagination and direct physical activity. Common features of games include uncertainty of outcome, agreed upon rules, competition, separate place and time, elements of fiction, elements of chance, prescribed goals and personal enjoyment.
  Games capture the ideas and worldviews of their cultures and pass them on to the future generation. Games were important as cultural and social bonding events, as teaching tools and as markers of social status. As pastimes of royalty and the elite, some games became common features of court culture and were also given as gifts. Games such as Senet and the Mesoamerican ball game were often imbued with mythic and ritual religious significance. Games like Gyan chauper and The Mansion of Happiness were used to teach spiritual and ethical lessons while Shatranj and Wéiqí were seen as a way to develop strategic thinking and mental skill by the political and military elite.
context_section_description: The Ancient Indian game of Pachisi was brought to the west by the British in the 1863 and an adaptation of the game named Parcheesi was first copyrighted in the United States by EG Selchow & Co in 1869. A version of the game called Ludo was patented in 1896. A similar German race game, Mensch ärgere dich nicht ("Man, don't get annoyed"), became immensely popular with German troops during World War I. Another Indian game which was adopted by the West was Gyan chauper (a.k.a. Moksha Patam), popularly known as snakes and ladders. This was a game which was intended to teach lessons about karma and good and bad actions, the ladders represented virtues and the snakes vices. The moral lesson of the game was that spiritual liberation, or Moksha could only be achieved through virtuous action, while vice led to endless reincarnation. The game dates to medieval India where it was played by Jains and Hindus. A Buddhist version, known as "ascending the [spiritual] levels" (Tibetan: sa gnon rnam bzhags) is played in Nepal and Tibet while a Muslim version of the game played during the mughal period from the late 17th or early 18th centuries featured the 101 names of God. The game was first brought to Victorian England and it was published in the United States as Chutes and Ladders (an "improved new version of England's famous indoor sport") by game pioneer Milton Bradley in 1943.
  The first board game for which the name of its designer is known is 'A Journey Through Europe or the Play of Geography', a map-based game published in 1759 by John Jefferys, a Geography and writing teacher. Designed in England by George Fox in 1800, The Mansion of Happiness became the prototype for commercial board games for at least two centuries to follow. The first board game published in the United States was 'Traveller's Tour Through the United States', published by New York City bookseller F. Lockwood in 1822. The earliest board games published in the United States were based upon Christian morality and included The Mansion of Happiness (1843) and The Game of Pope or Pagan, or The Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army (1844). While demonstrating the commercial viability of the ancient race game format, its moralistic overtones were countered by Milton Bradley in 1860 with the introduction of a radically different concept of success in The Checkered Game of Life, in which material successes came as a result of accomplishments such as attending college, marrying, and getting rich. Likewise the Game of the District Messenger Boy (1886) also focused on secular capitalist virtues rather than the religious. 
  First patented in 1904, The Landlord's Game, designed by Elizabeth Magie, was originally intended to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of Economic rent and the Georgist concept of a single tax on land value. A series of board games were developed from 1906 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. By 1933, a board game had been created much like the version of modern Monopoly by the Parker Brothers.
  Though the first commercial version of the game of Battleship was Salvo, published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company, the game itself dates to before World War I when it was played on paper by Russian officers. The French board game L'Attaque was first commercially released in 1910, having been designed two years prior as a military-themed imperfect knowledge game based upon the earlier Chinese children's board game Dou Shou Qi.  L'Attaque was subsequently adapted by the Chinese into Luzhanqi (or Lu Zhan Jun Qi), and by Milton Bradley into Stratego, the latter having been trademarked in 1960 while the former remains in the public domain. Jury Box, published in 1935, was the first murder mystery game which served as the basis for games like Cluedo.
  Initially designed in 1938, Scrabble received its first mass-market exposure in 1952, two years prior to the release of Diplomacy, in 1954. Diplomacy was a game favored by John F. Kennedy, and Henry Kissinger. 
caption: Gyan chauper, Late 18th Century Jain game board on cloth in the decorative arts gallery of the National Museum of India. Acc. No. 85.312
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 600D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2014:01:08 11:42:12", "Image Artist": "", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Copyright": "", "Image ExifOffset": "204", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "7970", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9991", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/50", "EXIF FNumber": "5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "3200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:01:04 12:59:28", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:01:04 12:59:28", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "45/8", "EXIF ApertureValue": "37/8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "43", "EXIF SubSecTime": "83", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "83", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "83", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3416", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4712", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "7846", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "1036800/181", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "691200/119", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}