Long before anyone printed a rulebook, people were scratching grids into stone, carving pits into wood and drawing circles in the dust to play games. A remarkable number of those games are still with us. They have crossed oceans, survived empires and changed names a dozen times, and you can still learn most of them in a few minutes.
Here are five of the great survivors. Each one has a different heart: sowing and counting, racing, jumping, surrounding and lining up. Between them they cover most of what makes a board game satisfying, and all of them are good games to share across generations.
Mancala: the sowing game
Mancala is not really one game but a whole family, played for centuries across Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia under many names. The common thread is the board, a row or rows of small pits, and the movement, called sowing. You scoop up all the seeds or stones from one pit and drop them one at a time into the following pits. Boards have been carved from wood, cut into stone and simply scooped out of the ground.
Our Mancala follows a popular modern two-row version. Each player has six pits and a store at one end. You choose one of your pits and sow its seeds counter-clockwise. If your last seed lands in your own store, you take another turn. If it lands in an empty pit on your side, you capture that seed and everything in the pit directly opposite, as long as that pit is not empty. When one side runs out of seeds, the game ends and the most seeds banked wins.
A first tip: count before you move. A pit holding exactly the number of seeds needed to reach your store gives you a free turn, and chaining free turns together is often the strongest thing you can do.
Backgammon: the race with a sting
Race games played with dice on long boards are among the oldest games we know of, and the Romans played a close relative of backgammon called tabula. The modern game is played on a board of twenty-four narrow triangles called points. Each player has fifteen checkers and moves them around the board in opposite directions according to two dice, aiming to bring them all into their home board and then bear them off. The first to bear off all fifteen wins.
What lifts it above a simple race is hitting. A single checker alone on a point is called a blot, and if your opponent lands on it, it is sent to the bar in the middle and must re-enter from the start before its owner can move anything else. Two or more checkers on a point make it safe, and a row of safe points can trap an opponent behind a wall.
A first tip: in the early game, try to make points, pairs of your checkers together, especially in and near your home board. They protect your checkers and block your opponent at the same time.
Checkers: jump, capture, crown
Checkers, called draughts in Britain and much of the world, took its familiar shape in Europe in the Middle Ages, building on older games played on lined boards. It is played on the dark squares of an eight by eight board, with twelve pieces each. Pieces move diagonally forward one square, and capture by jumping over an enemy piece into an empty square beyond. Reach the far row and your piece is crowned a king, which can move backward as well as forward.
Rules differ from country to country, which is worth knowing before a family game. In the standard American and British game, captures are compulsory and kings move one square at a time. International draughts, popular in parts of Europe and Africa, uses a ten by ten board, lets ordinary pieces capture backward, and gives kings long diagonal moves. Our Checkers uses standard American rules: captures are mandatory, multiple jumps chain together, and kings move both ways.
A first tip: keep your back row intact for as long as you sensibly can. Those pieces stop your opponent from crowning a king.
Go: surround to win
Go comes from China and is mentioned in writings more than two thousand years old, which makes it one of the oldest board games still played in its original form. It spread to Korea, where it is called baduk, and Japan, where the name Go comes from. The standard board has nineteen lines by nineteen, though smaller boards are popular for learning.
The rules are few. Players take turns placing black and white stones on the intersections of the lines, and stones never move once placed. A stone or a connected group with no empty points next to it is captured and removed. One rule, called ko, stops players from capturing a single stone back and forth forever. At the end, you score for territory you have surrounded, and under the rules our game uses, for your stones on the board as well.
Our Go offers a nine by nine board for beginners and thirteen by thirteen for a longer game, and White receives 6.5 bonus points to make up for Black moving first. A first tip: corners are easiest to claim, then edges, then the centre, so beginners often do well by starting near the corners.
Nine Men’s Morris: mills and flying
Nine Men’s Morris is played on a board of three nested squares joined at their midpoints, giving twenty-four points. Boards for it have been found scratched into stone in many parts of Europe, and it was well enough known in England for Shakespeare to mention it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Each player has nine pieces, called men. The game has two phases. First, players take turns placing their men on empty points. Then they take turns sliding a man along a line to a neighbouring empty point. Whenever you form a line of three of your own men, called a mill, you remove one of your opponent’s men. In the version our game uses, a player reduced to three men may fly, moving to any empty point, and a player reduced to two men, or left with no legal move, loses.
A first tip: during placement, do not rush to build a mill. Spread your men so they can move freely later; a player who is boxed in during the second phase can lose quickly.
A bonus from the north: hnefatafl
If you enjoy these, try hnefatafl, a family of Norse board games played in Scandinavia before chess became popular there. Unlike most games, the two sides are unequal. A king and his defenders start in the centre, and a larger force of attackers surrounds them. The king tries to escape to the edge; the attackers try to trap him. Our Hnefatafl plays the nine by nine version known as Tablut, and you can pick either side.
Why these games last
Each of these games needs very little equipment. You can draw a morris board on paper, play mancala with dried beans and an egg box, or mark a Go grid on a scrap of card. They are easy to learn and impossible to exhaust, and they work across ages: a child can win a game of mancala against a grandparent on a good day, and the grandparent will still be finding new ideas decades later.
They also carry stories. Asking where a game came from, or how someone’s family plays it, is a lovely way to start a conversation at the table. Pick one you have never tried, learn it together, and you will be joining a line of players that stretches back for centuries.