A museum in Kolkata dedicated to board games taps into memories, history
livemint.comUr, possibly the oldest board game in the world, discovered in a 4,400-year-old royal tomb in Mesopotamia in the 1930s. Mukherjee has a replica he got from the British Museum in London. “It’s a fairly simple two-person game but the rules were discovered much later," he says.
“From a Cochin Jewish family who had migrated to Israel. They called the game Asha." Then there’s Senet, the game of Pharaohs, played with pyramidal dice on a rectangular board of 30 squares, some with hieroglyphics. There’s Go from Japan, Viking chess from Scandinavia, Bagh-chal from Nepal where 15 goats try to evade three tigers on a board.
“If a tiger jumps over the goat, it eats the goat. But if there are two goats in a straight line, the tiger can’t jump and it’s cornered." Many of the games that are not on display are stacked around the room. One could almost do a timeline of world history through board games.
There’s a game that talks about racism using slaves and slaveholders, a suffragettes game where players have to evade the police and get to the House of Commons, even a Gandhi game. “You basically play as Congress, Muslim League, the extremists, the British Raj and so on. It’s a really intense game with a very thick manual," says Mukherjee.
And there’s no guarantee Gandhi will win every time. The games also reflect currents of migration. Games from East Africa end up in south India and then spread around the world.
Parcheesi was the precursor of Ludo, played with cowrie shells as dice. “It was taken to England in the 1890s and patented as Ludo," says Mukherjee. “I have a copy of the patent." Next to the parcheesi sits its close cousin, chaupar, played with long dice.
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