Human beings tend to bury objects that they consider most important to their lives. It’s not surprising, therefore, that some people chose to buy games, including board games. Some of these artifacts have survived the centuries, leaving modern-day archaeologists with a puzzle — how do you understand a game when you have no idea how it was played? Ancient humans, it seems, were downright terrible at losing the manuals for their boxed titles.
Tracing the evolution of games and gaming could tell us a great deal about cultural exchange and evolution between two societies or within one society over time. In a few cases, archaeologists have gotten lucky and found the actual rules to the game. More often, they’re stuck trying to intuit how a game might have worked by comparing it with other games that we do understand, or analyzing how a title is portrayed in art. The only clues for playing the ancient Egyptian game Senet, for example, are in the tomb of Queen Nefertari.
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