Essay: Fun facts about board games in ancient India
Hindustan TimesWith International Tabletop Day around the corner, we can expect the thriving board gaming communities in our metropolises to celebrate their interest in a pastime that combines skill, luck, and pure fun. Excavations in Lothal yielded a rich set of finds, including more than 75 game pieces, a number of brick and terracotta gaming boards marked with different patterns, and variously shaped dice with clear markings. The first kind of game he mentions are games played on an 8 by 8 square board, as chess was and still is. An earlier Arab chess expert, Al-adli, said, writing around 840, “It is universally acknowledged that three things were produced from India, in which no other anticipated it, and the like of which existed nowhere else: the book Kalila-wa-Dimna, the nine ciphers with which one can count to infinity, and chess.” Men in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, playing Cambodian chess or ouk-khmer, a game similar to makruk, Thai chess. Snakes and Ladders, commonly thought to be an entirely western board game, had its origins in the ancient Jain game Mokshapatam and the closely related Hindu Gyan Chauper.
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