mia timpano explores the origins
of some classic tabletop games.
CLUEDO // Look, you’ve got to do something during a World War II
air-raid blackout, whether it’s have sex, count to a thousand, or invent
one of the world’s most popular board games. In the case of English
musician and true-crime fan Anthony Pratt, the third option was
the most alluring – although he may have had loads of sexy times
and counted upwards of a thousand, too. It’s just that we don’t have
evidence of those things – but we do have evidence of his board game
(for which he pocketed just 5000 pounds), originally titled Murder!,
and later Clue or Cluedo (depending on the continent where you
reside). It was a murder mystery parlour game made miniature,
created as an antidote to the terribly tedious war, which was “killing
the country’s social life,” according to Pratt. The original Cluedo
featured a bunch more weapons than you’d fi nd in a modern set –
had you picked one up in 1949, the year it was launched, you might
have suspected Professor Plum of having killed the game’s victim
with the shillelagh, aka Irish walking stick, or a hypodermic needle.
In addition to the classic Cluedo, which sells, oh, around three
million copies a year, there are myriad spin-off versions, including
Simpsons Cluedo, which features a poisoned doughnut as a
weapon, and Golden Girls Cluedo, where the crime isn’t murder,
but eating the last piece of cheesecake.
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MAHJONG // OK. No one’s dead-set sure how Mahjong got started
- mostly because there are no historical records of the strategic
tile game that pre-date the 1800s. But there are some pretty cool
rumours fl ying around, including this one: during the King of Wu’s
reign in ancient China, a pretty lady was stuck in his court and
literally being bored to death, so she started hand-carving ivory and
bamboo into dominoes. She gathered her gals around to play with
the complete set of tiles – then, Confucius (who else?) took the
game, fi rmed up its rules, and called it ‘Mahjong’, which roughly
translates to ‘chattering sparrow’, because he liked birds. Hey,
crazier things have happened in this world – but for now, let’s
just say that’s a theory, the truth is out there, and so is Mahjong,
partly thanks to Joseph Babcock, an American who was working
for an oil company in Shanghai in 1920, then brought the game
back to the States, where he enshrined its rules (you win when you
arrange your tiles into four sets and a pair). By the way, Chairman
Mao banned Mahjong following the Communist Revolution, claiming
it was a capitalist game, because you could gamble on the outcome.
Folks caught playing would be arrested and sent to jail; the ban was
lifted in 1985, but even today, Mahjong is a point of contention
among law-makers....................
SCRABBLE // Love Scrabble? Then thank Butts. Alfred Mosher Butts,
to be precise – a well-named New York City architect who found
himself unemployed and bored out of his design-loving mind during
the Great Depression. Naturally, he decided to create a board game to
entertain the similarly unemployed masses at such a bleak time. And
Butts was smart. He combined all the most popular types of games- board games, dice games and letter games – to produce his own,
which he initially called Lexiko, then Criss-Cross Words. (The name
‘Scrabble’, meaning ‘to grasp, collect or hold on to something’ was
dreamed up by collaborator James Brunot much later.) To determine
the number of tiles per letter and assign them each a value, Butts
studied New York’s newspapers, scrupulously counting the letters
on each page (getting the balance right took him seven years). Given
the game’s enduring success – Scrabble has sold upwards of 150
million sets since its inception in 1933 – it’s kind of bonkers that
he couldn’t attract a corporate sponsor for over a decade. But then,
while Butts and some helpful pals were hand-making copies from
balsa wood in a makeshift factory (aka an abandoned schoolhouse
in the country), the owner of Macy’s department store discovered it,
dug it, put it on the store’s shelves, and Scrabble (fi nally) went nuts.
Now, people send death threats to Scrabble if they remove a word
from the game’s dictionary (true story).
t e histor of
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