When and which board game was the first to be ever invented?onhteisike
Which board game is the first to be ever invented, when was it invented and where?
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1You might have to specify some criteria on what counts as a board game. – Thunderforge 10 hours ago
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What is a game recommendation question? Anything where you're asking for answers providing a (set of) games meeting the criteria in the question. – pipe 1 hour ago
2 Answers
According to oldest.org, the oldest board game was Senet, invented ca. 3500 BCE in Egypt.
Some other ancient games that are popular are Checkers (c.3000 BCE, Ancient Mesopotamia), Go (c.c.2000 BCE, Ancient China) and Chess (c.600 AD, India or China)
This academic paper makes a strong claim for Three Men's Morris (later to become Nine Men's Morris; the game is generalised to 'merels' in the paper); it may be that some Stone Age or Bronze Age petroglyphs were boards scratched on boulders near houses. R.C Bell, in Board Games from Many Civilizations, claimed that a Three Men's Morris board was scratched into an Egyptian temple about 1400 BC, but it is fair to say this is not universally accepted.
Of course, the definition of a board game is somewhat vague. One petroglyph was apparently used in adjudicating 'court cases'; each side threw a stone over their shoulder and tried to hit the design, with the closer to the centre being approved by the gods, so deemed to be telling the truth. This is no longer used in jurisprudence (to the best of my knowledge), but could be considered a game...
