It’s National Board Game Day.
And we’re going back to the very beginning, the very first board game in US history.
Though explaining which game was the very first is slightly complicated.
For a long time, people thought the oldest American board game was one called The Mansion of Happiness, which dated back to 1843.
In that game, players moved their tokens across a series of spaces that represented virtues or vices.
Land on a virtue and they’d get to move toward the center of the board, home of the title mansion.
Land on a vice, and they’d get further and further away from happiness.
The moral of the game was: be (or at least try to land on something) good.
But even though that game had been advertised as “The first board game ever published in America,” it actually wasn’t.
A New York company had published a board game in 1822, about two decades before The Mansion of Happiness, though it wasn’t nearly as well known as that game.
And its name was kind of a mouthful: “The Travellers’ Tour Through The United States.”
It was modeled after European geography games, in which players could move their pieces across a map board by giving facts about geography.
In this game, a player would hear a description of a place, like a commercial city northeast of Washington with about 63,000 inhabitants, and if they said Baltimore, they could move their token there.
The winner was the first player to get all the way from one end of the country to the other, though, of course, this was 1822, so the final destination for this cross-country trip was… New Orleans.
Opening tomorrow in Kansas City, it’s the Museum of BBQ.
It’s a brand new interactive museum about the history of barbecue cooking and barbecue culture.
And if you’re hungry afterwards, there’s a BBQ restaurant in the neighborhood!
What America’s first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation (The Conversation)
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Image via Library of Congress
