Board Games

Beijing Board Game Players


Board Games

Board games, that is, rule-bound games played on table tops or floors, and involving role-playing, chance outcome, or skill, evolved very differently in the United States than elsewhere. When we traveled in China and Tibet, it was easy to see folks enjoying the traditional games which formed the foundation of some of these pastimes. Today, such games may be said to be central to American leisure and political culture.

In part all of that is because of the unique origins of the United Stated as a nation. Immigrant patterns and labor demands created a setting in which many of the globe’s wide variety of game styles—contributed from Africa, Asia, and Europe—arrived fully formed and at almost the same time. In part it’s because this presentation of all the world’s game forms itself took place in the midst of a quickly changing epoch of technological innovation and social evolution. Throughout China, Tibet, and Japan it’s easy to see enormously well beautiful, expensive, and of course well crafted board sets for sale. You can also watch people on the street, given a spare moment, fashion a game from a bit of discarded cardboard and bottle caps and set-to for an impromptu competition.

Leisure Studies scholars and Gaming Specialists understand that in spite of the enormous apparent variety in board games, just a few basic principles underlie all of them. Some games involve creation of a role-playing environment, some involve skills (and, thus, some play can be “skillful”), and some involve various mechanisms approximating random number generation. In the last sort, players “play” against the unknown future outcome of that device – often a die, a pattern of cards, or mechanical instrument of some kind.

In order for a “game” to exist, these basic features, ordered in some way, are then bound by rules of greater or lesser complexity. Games can then be made to model “real life,” after a fashion, by carefully combining elements of role-playing, skill requirement, and chance outcome components. In the New World, Go, Mah Jong and Chess, various European card-based games, African games such as Awele, Bao, Dakon, and others of the Mancala group, and games enjoyed by Native Americans were played in traditional forms by new groups of players, and were also hybridized. New, variant forms were then played.

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