Game History Library
Every game in this collection has its own story - some over five thousand years old, some barely a decade. Read through them here, in roughly the order each game first appeared, or jump straight to any one's full history page.
Dates for the oldest games are approximate - their exact origins are often lost to history or debated by historians.
-
c. 3100 BCE
Senet
One of the oldest board games ever found - and one whose exact rules have been lost for thousands of years.
Full history → -
c. 2600 BCE
Ur
At roughly 4,600 years old, the Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board games ever discovered - and, thanks to a piece of detective work spanning two millennia, one of the few ancient games we can still play by its original rules.
Full history → -
c. 1400 BCE
Morris
Few games have been carved into as many different surfaces across as many centuries as Nine Men's Morris - from Egyptian temple roofs to English cathedral cloisters.
Full history → -
c. 4th century BCE
Go
Go is one of the oldest board games still played in its original form - a game of territory and stones with roots that likely reach back over 2,500 years in China.
Full history → -
Iron Age, c. 400 CE
Hnefatafl (Viking Chess)
One of the oldest board game families in Northern Europe, played across the Viking world for centuries before chess ever arrived there.
Full history → -
1732 CE (documented)
Tablut
The best-documented member of the entire Tafl family, thanks to one 18th-century naturalist's notebook.
Full history → -
1st millennium CE (debated)
Mancala
Mancala isn't one game but an entire family of them - among the oldest game families on Earth, built around the simple, universal act of moving seeds or stones between pits.
Full history → -
traditional, exact origin undated
Bagh-Chal
Nepal's most iconic traditional board game: tigers hunting goats across a lattice of lines, with roots far older than any written record of the rules.
Full history → -
traditional, exact origin undated
Surakarta
A traditional Indonesian board game named after the very city on Java where it is believed to have originated.
Full history → -
traditional, pre-contact Hawaii
Konane
A traditional Native Hawaiian game of stones and strategy, carved directly into the land it was played on.
Full history → -
c. 6th century CE
Chess
From an ancient Indian war game to the world's most studied board game - chess has crossed continents and centuries to become what it is today.
Full history → -
c. 10th century CE
Xiangqi
Chinese chess shares deep roots with international chess, yet took its own distinct path over more than a thousand years to become the game played by hundreds of millions today.
Full history → -
c. 12th century CE
Checkers
Checkers (draughts) is a game of simple rules and deep strategy, born from combining an ancient board with a newer way of capturing.
Full history → -
16th century CE
Shogi
Japan's take on the chess family, and the only major variant where a captured piece doesn't leave the game - it joins the side that captured it.
Full history → -
c. 16th-17th century CE
Fanorona
The national board game of Madagascar, and a source of real cultural pride and legend.
Full history → -
17th century CE (name)
Backgammon
Backgammon's family tree runs through nearly every civilization that has rolled dice - from ancient Mesopotamia and Rome to the coffee houses of the modern Middle East.
Full history → -
1697
Peg Solitaire
A single-player puzzle old enough to have its own court legend, and the subject of one of the more surprising results in recreational mathematics.
Full history → -
19th century
Klondike
The single most iconically named, most widely played patience game there is - so ubiquitous that for a couple of generations of computer users, "Solitaire" meant this one specific game.
Full history → -
1880s
Dots and Boxes
A pencil-and-paper game more than a century old, and a genuine subject of serious mathematical study.
Full history → -
1883
Reversi
A Victorian parlor game, reinvented twice over a century apart.
Full history → -
1884
Halma
An American reworking of an older German game, popular for well over a century as a simple race that's easy to learn but still rewards careful planning.
Full history → -
1896 (English patent)
Ludo
A modern, mass-produced descendant of one of India's oldest board games.
Full history → -
early 20th century
Gomoku (Five in a Row)
A simple line-them-up game whose very simplicity forced competitive players to change its rules.
Full history → -
1928
Chinese Checkers
A star-board descendant of the older game Halma, marketed under an exotic name that has nothing to do with where it was actually invented.
Full history → -
1942
Hex
A rare case of the same simple, elegant game being invented twice, independently, by two people who'd go on to become well known for entirely different reasons.
Full history → -
1956 (as Yahtzee)
Yatzy
A dice game whose scoring categories - pairs, three and four of a kind, a full house, a straight - read like a hand of poker, because that's exactly where they came from.
Full history → -
1966 (as Cross Sums)
Kakuro
Like Sudoku, Kakuro started life in an American puzzle magazine under a different name, and only became a household word decades later on the other side of the Pacific.
Full history → -
Nikoli, exact date undocumented
Hashiwokakero
A pure counting-and-connectivity puzzle from the same Japanese publisher that turned Sudoku into a global phenomenon, with a name and a flavor that both trace back to the idea of connecting things with bridges.
Full history → -
exact date undocumented
Skyscrapers
Skyscrapers belongs to the same family of Latin-square puzzles Sudoku comes from, but adds a distinctive twist that gives it its name: a line-of-sight rule read in from just outside the grid.
Full history → -
1967 (Milton Bradley edition)
Fleet Battle
A pencil-and-paper guessing game turned world-famous plastic-and-pegs classic - and, here, a generic version of it under a different name.
Full history → -
1970
Mastermind
A code-breaking game of pure logic, with no rival player to outwit, that grew out of a much older pencil-and-paper guessing game and went on to become a favorite subject for computer scientists studying how to search for a hidden answer efficiently.
Full history → -
1974
Four in a Row
A simple gravity-powered idea that turned into one of the best-selling games of the 20th century.
Full history → -
1978
FreeCell
A century-old card game family whose most famous variant, unusually, is famous largely because of a very specific piece of 1990s software.
Full history → -
1979
Sudoku
Unlike every other game in this collection, Sudoku has no ancient pedigree at all - it's barely older than the personal computer.
Full history → -
1985
Nonograms (Picross)
A logic puzzle invented independently, on opposite sides of the world, within a few years of each other - and named after one of its two inventors.
Full history → -
1986
Mahjong Solitaire
A single-player tile-matching game named after, and visually borrowing from, a completely different four-player game it has almost nothing else in common with.
Full history → -
1987
Abalone
A modern classic: one of the few abstract strategy games designed in the late 20th century to become a genuine, lasting commercial and competitive success.
Full history → -
1988
Amazons
The Game of the Amazons is a modern abstract strategy game about carving up territory by permanently blocking off the board, one square at a time.
Full history → -
1989
Minesweeper
A puzzle whose defining rule - a completely safe first move - only became standard once computers, rather than a printed page, could generate a fresh board on demand.
Full history → -
1989 (Nikoli)
Slitherlink
Unlike Kakuro or Sudoku - both puzzles that started life elsewhere and only later passed through Japan - Slitherlink is a home-grown Nikoli invention from the start, with no earlier Western original to trace back to.
Full history → -
1995
Lights Out
A 1990s handheld electronic puzzle that turned out to hide a genuinely elegant piece of mathematics underneath its simple button grid.
Full history → -
1997
Wall Maze
PaperGames's Wall Maze is our version of Quoridor: a modern abstract strategy game that turns a simple race across a grid into a genuine battle of wits, just by adding a handful of walls.
Full history → -
1998 (Windows)
Spider Solitaire
A two-deck patience game with no exact birth certificate, like most of the family it belongs to - but one whose modern fame traces back to the very same company that made Klondike a household name.
Full history → -
2012 (Windows 8)
Pyramid Solitaire
A patience game built around a completely different mechanic from Klondike, FreeCell, or Spider: instead of building sequences, you clear the board by pairing cards that add up to 13.
Full history → -
2014
Card Tactics
A modern addition to the family of abstract strategy games, built around a small twist on chess-like movement: instead of every piece having a fixed way of moving, a shared deck of cards decides what's possible from turn to turn.
Full history → -
2014
2048
A game built almost entirely out of other games' ideas, made in a weekend, and cloned by more people than perhaps any browser game before it.
Full history →