Article suitable for older students

Calendars and board games

12th Aug 2024

Men Playing Board Games, from The Sougandhika Parinaya Manuscript

We ended Chapter 3 of our ‘mystery project’ in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Here were three pioneering and successful scholars with a strong shared interest in bringing to the attention of the world the ‘story’ behind ancient calendars, games and divination: Stewart Culin, Frank Cushing and Zelia Nuttall. At this point we need to delve a little into the history of board games – the first of which date as far back as c8,000-9,000 BCE, in Syria (Finkel 2007, personal communication) - to see how these three themes are interconnected… (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

First, a word of introduction on the universal benefits, whatever the theme, of playing board games to the players themselves - something only recently being researched and understood by game historians, and summarised by Ellie Dix:-
• Low entry bar; huge variety today of games, all portable and easy to store; playing - ‘a complete experience in itself’; an indoor pursuit, involving an unlimited resource (play over and over again); increases interaction - awareness of others (voice and body language) - and boosts relationships; inclusive (anyone can play); ‘improves memory formation and cognitive skills, increases processing speed, develops logic and reasoning skills, improves critical thinking, boosts spatial reasoning, improves verbal and communication skills, increases attention and concentration, teaches problem-solving, develops confidence, and improves decision-making...’ (2019: 8-9). What’s more, for those on the autistic spectrum who struggle with social interaction, playing a board game can provide a better, happier environment (Finkel, ‘Do Pass Go’ podcast). The bottom line, as Irving Finkel puts it so succinctly, is ‘they make you think!’
In social terms they are ‘a tool of engagement’. ‘Early board games gave everyone a role to play, and a time and space to talk’ (Mahdawi 2016).

75 years ago Erasmus stressed that in essence today’s games function much as did those of yesteryear: ‘The dice-and-board games of today do not differ in principle from those of the Aztecs and the Hindus. A game as American as Monopoly uses the same devices. True, the counter conflict is somewhat more disguised: instead of “killing” one another, Monopoly players, by the movement of their counters, establish priority to certain squares along the track which they can later use to tax other players unfortunate as to have their counters land on them’ (1950: 128).
Much of the insight we enjoy today stems from the monumental work undertaken 150 or more years ago by dedicated researchers such as Culin and Cushing. Their pioneering research enabled games worldwide to be classified and analysed scientifically, ‘… making it “possible for the first time to give them their true place in the scale of human arts and Institutions!”’ (John Wesley Powell, letter to Culin 12/1/1894).
We should recognise, however, that it was Culin whose work on games was truly world-leading: ‘The richness of the primary information he collected and published… is completely without a rival’ (Finkel 2007: 3). ‘No single scholar has so dominated the ethnology of games since Culin’s time’ (Freeman-Witthoft 1988: 54).

The Washington Post (July 8, 1897, p. 101) reported that the work ‘which he is compiling on the games of the world has attracted much attention’… ‘If the specimens in Mr. Culin’s collection were arranged as are the specimens in the possession of the National Museum the collection would extend over an extent two miles in length’ (ibid).
At just this time, a British contemporary, Edward B. Tylor, drew attention to the joint roles of divination and gambling in driving the evolution of games: ‘The use of lots or dice for gambling arose out of an earlier serious use of such instruments for magical divination’ (1879: 70).
This was confirmed by Culin who, after many years of researching ancient games all round the world, concluded that a key games ancestor was the Korean nyout, which ‘may be regarded as the prototype of a large class of common games, such as the Game of Goose, Backgammon, Pachisi and Chess. It is clearly divinatory in its associations, the diagram representing the world with its four quarters’ (1896: 685).
Modern games historians (Finkel, 2007; Parlett, 1999; van Binsbergen, n.d.) have consistently reinforced this centuries-old link, tying in fortune telling, astrology, betting, astronomy, and the the formal apparatus used in them all - from calibrated boards and grids to counters and even trapezes.

Van Binsbergen, in his paper appropriately titled ‘Board-games and divination in global cultural history’ (n.d.), calls board games and divination systems magical ‘space-shrinking time-machines’ that have provided humans for centuries with ‘a manageable miniature version of the world’ reflecting the cosmos above - or, as McGee puts it ‘games function as miniaturised models of the universe’ (1985: 263). As a case study Van Binsbergen analyses the role of the grid as a computational aid, which ‘appears in Late Babylonian magic as the cuneiform representation of the constellations’.
One of the oldest game formats appears to be the circuit or cross-and-circle shape, Korean Nyout being the prototypical ‘cross and circle game of classic elegance and simplicity’ (Parlett 1999: 40). Pachisi – and Mesoamerican Patolli – follow the same essential ‘cruciform’ design. ‘The Pachisi track is severely symmetrical, the Patolli track uniquely asymmetrical, yet the Patolli track, if opened out, is nothing but a circle, whereas the Pachisi track… is topologically a cross and circle design’ (ibid: 54).
Indeed it was the similarities between Pachisi and Patolli that led first Tylor and then Culin, Brinton and others to posit the idea that some elements of Mesoamerican culture originated in Asia.

Whilst such theories have since been discredited, the cross-cultural similarities remain striking. Back in 1950 Erasmus noted 5-6 ‘specific features in which pachisi and patolli agree: flat dice, scoreboard, cross-shape, several men, killing opponents, penalty or safety stations’ (p114). In his classic work ‘Backgammon among the Aztecs’, Edward Tylor noted that, as in Patolli, in India’s pachisi, play travelled ‘from right to left (contrary to the sun)’. Even players’ games paraphernalia showed similarities: ‘Pachisi is a favourite game in India, and an eager player will carry rolled round in his turban the cloth which serves as a board, so as to be ready for a game at any moment’ – just as we know, thanks to Spanish chroniclers, that Patolli players in Aztec Mexico carried rolled up game mats under their arms.
Scoring methods had much in common and were kept in different ways: sticks or bones passed hand to hand in Native North America; further south some form of scoreboard was used – either temporary or permanent ‘in the case of peoples with substantial architecture, on floors or on top of masonry benches’ (Voorhies 2013: 104).

Cushing and Culin, sharing the data they had amassed, came to somewhat sweeping conclusions. Wrote Cushing:-
‘I now have arrow-games from the British Dominions to Mexico, exhibiting four systems of counting that are just so many steps toward the evolution of diagram games. First, the tally system [counts kept with sticks…]… Then we have the Awl game, in which a diagram marked on the skin is used… and tally sticks… Then we have the circle of holes… then the circle of movable stones in place of the holes, of stick-men or markers in place of the pegs, and of beans or kernels in place of tallies. Finally come the semi-human and approximately square diagrams of the four quarters seen in the North Mexican games, which leads directly, in the one case, to Pachisi and in the other, to Stone Warriors!... You will be astounded to see how completely in still earlier stages of the development, the arrow has coloured nearly ALL games… Verily we have found the DIVINING ROD which reveals all mysteries!’ (Culin correspondence p13 – letter dated Nov 1, 1893).

Culin had studied games materials extensively, and found multiple examples, starting on home ground: ‘Amerindian binaries illustrated by Culin were made from such varied materials as bone, brass, cane, china, corn grain, fruit stones, ivory, leather, limestone, nuts, nut shells, pottery, sea shells, and wood… “Marked”, and “unmarked” sides are equivalent to the “1” and “0” of binary arithmetic’ (Parlett 1999: 22). Parlett suggests that Amerindian binaries were ‘most typically of flattish wooden staves marked on one side and plain on the other, with markings often suggestive of divinatory arrows. The games themselves, though widely played to satisfy individual gambling interests, often had a ceremonial or symbolic value too.’ (ibid, 36-37).
Culin noted that at Zuni the dice are referred to as ‘arrows’, as is the game itself and with the four cardinal directions; they circle the kiva (sacred house/centre) in an anti-clockwise direction (McGee, 1985).
Binary arithmetic underpins much of our modern, digital world, and has played a key role since pre-history. ‘Instead of aiming a stone or spear at a target, the early gamesters might have flung the stone – or shell or bone – into the air, so that chance could decide its position on reaching the ground. Dice would be a logical development from stones, shells or bones…’ (Caillois 1961: 226). It’s salutary to realise that our modern practice of ‘tossing a coin’ – the most universal of binaries today – is essentially the same principle for casting lots as used by humans millennia ago!

The symmetry found in many game boards around the world - easily derived from the symmetrical structure of the human body: left and right, back and front - have led several games historians to draw parallels with earth’s four cardinal directions: ‘Patolli boards probably represent the cosmos, with arms indicating the world’s four corners...’ (Walden & Voorhies 2017: 199) - each direction associated with a particular deity, and, together with the central fifth axis, forming a perfect quincunx (Kendall, 1980: 17). ‘The games were sacred and possessed elaborate cosmological and religious symbolism evocative of the calendar cycles. Far from being frivolous amusements like our own games, they were highly charged mystical exercises and, conceptually at least, were serious miniature simulations of the passage of time and the movement of the heavenly bodies across the firmament’ (ibid: 3-4).
Leading archaeoastronomer Antony Aveni found that pecked-cross circles at Teotihuacan formed a kind of grid for the layout of the city, the common presence of 260 holes on the axes matching the length of the ancient ritual calendar: ‘Some of the pecked-cross circles also resemble an ancient Aztec game called patolli’ (2001: 339). Similar grids, pecked into floors or carved on rock outcrops have been found not just at Teotihuacan but throughout Mesoamerica. All have axes that are in line with the city structures of the region. ‘Because they are aligned with the structures of the cities, they also align with the position of significant astronomical bodies’ (ibid: 330). In an earlier study Aveni found that the grid axes tended to point ‘in the general direction of the rising or setting points of the sun at the solstices’ (1980: 230). He was struck by the ‘hidden likeness between cross petroglyphs and calendar wheels’ and quoted Spanish chronicler Fray Diego Durán’s comment, talking of patolli, that ‘Small cavities were carved out of a stuccoed floor in the manner of a lottery board…’ (ibid: 231).
Mountjoy and Smith appeared to go further: noting that patolli boards were oriented to the cardinal directions, they observed that the game ‘was probably not played by traversing all four arms of the cross but rather three, making the number of squares for movement of a counter through the full path 52’. Moreover two players would symbolically complete a sacred 104-year round (1985: 255). This, however, was already known...

In his groundbreaking study of patolli, Timothy Kendall (1980), after underlining the key importance of numbers ‘both functionally and symbolically’ in the ‘elegant Mexican calendar’, and outlining the basic workings of the calendar system (pp 18-20), points out that it was in fact the great Mexican archaeologist, anthropologist and historian Alfonso Caso who ‘first recognised a direct relationship between patolli and the calendar; once he had established approximately how the game was played, and the fact that the opponents moved their pieces through only three arms of the cross instead of four, he saw that on the Pedregal patolli board the total number of squares in three of its arms was exactly fifty-two. There could now be no doubt that the movement of playing pieces along this track symbolised the passage of the calendar cycle. This fact also explained why the Indians referred to the playing cards of the Spaniards as “paper patolli”. Obviously, in the fifty-two cards they saw the fifty-two squares of the patolli track and, of course, the fifty-two years of their “century”. In the four packs of a deck, they must therefore have seen the four thirteen-year quarters of the “century” that were associated with the four cardinal directions, symbolised in patolli by the four arms of the cross’ (p 21). It is of course an intriguing question whether the number of cards and suits in a pack represent the 52 weeks and 4 seasons in our own calendar year. Today, it should be added, we ‘play’ card games for entertainment, but as Culin pointed out, these things ‘were once the most serious things known to humanity, survivals, indeed of the divinatory rites which were once universally practiced by primitive man…’ (Culin Correspondence, p 67),

Numbers ‘sacred’ in ancient Mesoamerica - including 4, 5, 13, 20 and 52, all linked to calendrical counts - constantly feature in the design and playing of patolli. Kendall’s work led the eminent Mesoamericanist Cecelia Klein to conclude, in her celebrated essay ‘Woven Heaven, Tangled Earth’ -
‘The image of a bipartite universe interlaced at the middle is reflected in the Mesoamerican game of Patolli as reconstructed by Kendall after ethnographic accounts of the game played today in rural Puebla. The game’s most surprising feature, says Kendall, is the track the two players followed, for, as each traversed only three of the four arms of the Aztec form of the playing field, their pieces met only in the “no man’s land” at the middle. In the Mixtec manuscript depictions of the Patolli playing board, this central section is marked by an interlace created either by the twisted cords that seem to have formed the field itself, of by those that made up the enigmatic ollin [movement] symbol…. For the Aztec, this place at the middle was the home of the dual god Ometeotl’ (pp 14-15) – the interlace of heaven and earth…?

In ancient and modern games, the numbers, then, are far from randomly chosen, and are a key element in the design of the game board itself.
Patolli and Monopoly are games designed as a circuit and play can go around the board any number of times. Pachisi does not really involve spirals or circuits, but may be seen as a number of simultaneous tracks leading from a beginning to an end. These, with spiral games, seemed, in Culin’s understanding, to be the three major non-chess types of board games (Freeman-Witthoft 2007).
Culin took a particular interest in Patolli:-
‘The game of Patolli by which we now generally understand the game played with marked beans instead of canes or staves, upon a cross shaped diagram, is probably a derived form of the cane game, the use of beans being paralleled at the present day among the Cherokee’ (1896: 801). Culin quotes Spanish Jesuit historian Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s description of Patolli from Sinaloa, from his history of the Jesuit missions of Mexico, published in 1645: ‘In place of [dice] they use certain four small canes, scratched, less in length than a span, and upon these they have certain small figures and points which give them their value or loss. When they play they throw these down, casting them upon a small stone in order that they may rebound and fall with their points at random…’ (trans Culin) (ibid: 801-2).

Number symbolism is one of several parallels between Patolli and Monopoly mentioned by games historians. ‘Even Monopoly can be deconstructed into a distant descendant of primitive race games such as Nyout…’ (Parlett 1999: 349); ‘Monopoly is basically a race game… one in which [the aim] is to be the last one circulating when everyone else has dropped out through exhaustion of energy. Energy is represented by, and measured in terms of, money…’ (ibid); ‘Up to this point, Monopoly can be seen as an expansion of the Royal Game of Goose’ (ibid: 350).
‘The number of squares on the internal side of the cross-marks [in Patolli] totals forty, a figure prominent in Amerindian race games such as Zohn Ahl, while the number at the four extremities totals ten’ (Parlett 1999: 53). In both Monopoly and its antecedent The Landlord’s Game the same number features: referring to The Landlord’s Game Orbanes notes: ‘Notice the similarities to the Monopoly game: a continuous path of forty spaces; four railroads, one centered on each side; two utilities – a water and electric franchise; twenty-two other rental properties, the value of which increases constantly as one travels clockwise round the board…’ (2007: 13).

Both Patolli and Monopoly are race games, with a long pedigree and a straightforward premise: ‘The simplest process of moving pebbles round a circuit of holes in accordance with the throw of dice was universally perceived as representing a real-life race…’ (Parlett 1999: 6). A classic example is The Royal Game of Goose, a spiral game with a beginning and an end; with its origins in medieval Europe it was from early on considered a gambling game. A propos, Freeman-Witthoft (2007) noted that games like this have been most popular in countries where governments conduct lotteries and where a spirit of gambling is prevalent’ (p 271). It has many variants, Mansion of Happiness being the form of goose – or ‘snake’ - game first published and played in America in 1847; a Christian morality game, and the first mass-produced US board game, [it] was ‘intended to teach ethics to young people’ (p 272), ‘Vices are punished and virtues rewarded as the game goes on…’

In the case of Patolli, however, random chance did not underpin the game. The idea that the outcome should be based on pure ‘luck’ or ‘chance’ appears largely remote from human experience. Native Americans for instance ‘neither believed in nor knew anything of luck or chance’. ‘The Indians believed that signs of good or ill omen were actually expressions of encouragement or warnings sent directly by one of the supernatural beings who made the path of the Indian smooth or rough’ (Macfarlan 1958: 17). What role could chance play in a largely pre-destined society? Walden & Voorhies (2017: 200) suggest Nahuatl lacks a word for ‘chance’; the closest word might be motonal - tu día/destino/suerte (your fate or destiny) (Hunab Ku project, Puebla, personal communication 28th Oct 2023).
‘The player who tossed the beans in fact was soliciting a manifestation of destiny… The game of patolli is not a game of chance, but literally a game of fate where destiny became incarnate in the fall of the sacred beans’ (Duverger & Walker 1984: 44). Yes, skill might play a part (in how the beans or dice were thrown) but success depended largely on how they landed - it represented ‘a way for players to check their status with the deities’, to ‘test the power of the astronomical signs under which they were born (and their subsequent destinies) against one another... which accounts for the heavily ritualised pregame activities’ (Walden & Voorhies 2017: 200).

Over a century earlier, Daniel Brinton stressed the power of these ‘calendrical signs’: ‘The painted paper or skin on which the Calendar was represented by its symbols was taken as a ground on which lots were cast, and as they fell on one or other of the signs, they betokened a fortunate or unfavourable outcome of an undertaking’ (1893: 271). Significantly, in the Central Mexican sacred calendar two daysigns are expressly related to games - Rabbit and Flower. As Kendall explains (1980: 18) ‘‘Many gods, like the game gods Macuilxochitl (“Five Flower”) and Ometochtli (“Two Rabbit”), actually bore the names of the days they ruled, so that day and god appear indistinguishable… Obviously the squares of the board were imagined to be the “houses” of the gods in time – or indeed the very days of the calendar’. The association of Patolli with divination is immediately clear: both involve the act of casting and laying out of beans into ‘houses’ on a mat or cloth. Little surprise, therefore, that the Aztecs ‘used patol beans in shamanistic divination, often to diagnose diseases’ (Walden & Voorhies 2017: 200).
Victims of the uncertainty of life - and of the universe itself - game players resorted to gambling and drinking (Verbeeck, 1998) - something that resonated to the Spaniards, who compared their own (betting on) card games to Aztecs playing patolli: ‘In this way the natives spoke to the beans and to the mat, uttering a thousand loving words, a thousand compliments, a thousand superstitions…’ (Durán, 1971: 304). The Aztecs bet everything – from clothes to cacao, from land to jewellery, from slaves to houses (‘possessions of any kind’) - and finally themselves; if they lost they risked becoming slaves to the victor (Gonzalbo, 2004: 293).

Returning to the design and shape of the Patolli board, its symmetry - the whole forms a perfect quincunx - has long led researchers to imbue it with astronomical and calendrical meaning (Swezey & Bittman, 1983: 391). The Movement sign at the centre of (particularly Mixtec codex) depictions of the game - mentioned above - has been taken as symbolic of the sun’s apparent circular path during the year and planetary rotations in general, an association that can perhaps also be applied to other Mesoamerican rituals, from dances (invariably moving anticlockwise) to the ball game and the Voladores ceremony (Hunt, 1977).
Half a century ago, in his study of Mesoamerican crossed trapezes, Adrian Digby documented the connections between Patolli and astronomy in some detail:-
‘If we look for some design which might suggest a scale on each axis, the board for the game of Patolli is the obvious choice. It has calendrical connections… Caso believed that it represented the fifty-two-year cycle, and Sahagún… says it was stopped because of suspicions of its being connected with “superstitious” practices. If, as is possible, the board was used as a kind of abacus on which the movement of the sun and moon were represented by the movement of beans, he may well have been right. In the drawing in the Codex Magliabecchiano, there are seven divisions on each arm of the cross working outward from their intersection (except on the top arm where the last graduation seems to have been omitted through carelessness by the draftsman)…
‘If we assume that the seven divisions represent thirteen days, we find that the ninety-one days from the winter solstice, represented by the missing division at the top of the drawing, to the equinox at the centre, and a further ninety-one days from the equinox to the summer solstice, make 182 days, and with a similar time for the return journey we arrive at a total of 364 days, which is the length of the computing year described by Thompson. We could consider that the traverse of the shadow was divided into seven units of thirteen, which would give us the same divisions on the [astronomical] instrument as appear on the Patolli board... In conclusion there seems to be a very good case for equating the Patolli board with the trapeze and for believing that both were graduated in units of thirteen days’ (1974: 278-9).

There is the risk, of course, of assuming that Mesoamericans of yesteryear lived their lives entirely at the mercy of the universe, their fate predestined by the signs in their calendar. We know this was in fact not the case. Indeed, playing board games may have made life significantly easier: perhaps, as McGee suggests, ‘it is the task of games to present the uncertainty of the universe – the unknown – in a context of the very well known – the traditional world view – in order to make the unknown less frightening and maybe even to make it enjoyable’ (1985: 287).

The purpose of this chapter is to set out the background to the development of Monopoly in the United States, and to outline the path along which the underlying concepts of the game – its structure, materials and ethos – evolved. Games all over the world generally enjoy surprising longevity, despite prohibitions and other obstacles (Finkel, personal communication, 2007). Concomitantly, the ‘invention’ of a board game can be slow and painful:-
‘Great games as intricate as the Monopoly game don’t just spring forth from the mind of a daydreamer. Ask any game inventor and they’ll tell you just how difficult it is to come up with a really new game, as involved and carefully balanced as the Monopoly game’ (‘Mr Monopoly’, quoted in Orbanes, 2007: 11). Thanks to the hugely impressive and dedicated work of Ralph Anspach in his ‘Anti-Monopoly’ fight against Parker Brothers in the early 1970s, we now know that Monopoly was originally the brainchild, not of an unemployed heating salesman Charles Darrow in the 1930s but of a radical feminist, Lizzie Magie, who first patented her Landlord’s Game in 1903. The story of how Darrow effectively ‘stole’ the idea of Monopoly from Magie has now been fully exposed, through books and documentaries, reversing her original ANTI-monopoly vision for the game. What almost no-one has ever considered is where Magie got HER idea from for the Landlord’s Game. Yes, we know she invented the game as a novel way to spread the ideas of the progressive 19th century Single Tax campaigner Henry George, but what inspired her revolutionary use of a (square) endless-circuit board, as opposed to all the previous game boards which were start-to-finish in design?

I think I have the answer…! I believe it took her the best part of a decade - working very part-time - to come up with her idea. Isn’t this an unrealistically long time? Far from it! As Culin himself wrote at the time (1897): ‘Modern ingenuity can not be said to have risen to the point of inventing a game. All games were invented ages ago, and it is to be questioned whether a single application for a patent upon the idea of a game would be granted in our patent office were the history of primitive games fully known and accessible’ (Washington Post July 8, 1897, p.102). And he should know. His decades of work in the field of researching and collecting games was put on show at the World Fairs and in museums at exactly this time.
Patolli was one of the multitude of world games that Culin exhibited in Chicago in 1893 at the WCE:-
• 39 Patolli: A game like Pachisi. Ancient Mexico. Reproduction of native picture, from copy of sixteenth century Hispano-Mexican manuscript, with kind permission of Mrs. Zelia Nuttall (Culin 1896: 854) – note the role of Nuttall…
It is my firm belief – supported by a mountain of circumstantial evidence that I will present in future chapters - that Magie visited WCE, heard (of)/saw/met/conversed with/was inspired by/learnt from Nuttall, Culin, Cushing, Brinton and others, was fascinated by the idea of a circuitous board/calendrical diagram and went on to incorporate the format as the base for her new game. Take the word of a modern-day game designer and games expert, David Parlett: in a talk in 2014 explaining how his game Hare & Tortoise came to be, it was clear that design PRECEDED the theme: he developed and tested his board first: ‘From there on the game invented itself… it was the ideal example of the mechanics of a game inspiring the theme or storyline rather than vice-versa’. Obviously this isn’t always the case – many amateur game inventors start with a theme and fit this into an existing game mechanism - but it’s very likely to have been the sequence in Magie’s story. Precisely because there are 40 spaces on her game board, this suggests she BEGAN with that number in mind and added the values/clues/charges into the spaces to fit the design.