Whether on holidays or to pass the time in lockdown: board games are a popular pastime – and have been for centuries. A historian has now gained a revealing insight into past gaming trends by examining the Augsburger Kunstkabinett, a collection of small art objects and games donated to the Swedish King Gustav Adolph in 1632.
Many of the board games we play to this day have long histories – many of them existed as early as the 16th century or even long before that. Mill was played in late antiquity and the chess game, which originated in the Orient, was already established in Europe in the Middle Ages. Games like backgammon or early forms of the dice game “Mensch ärgere dich nicht” have a similarly long history.
From Augsburg to the Swedish royal court
Greger Sundin, curator at the Gustavianum of Uppsala University in Sweden, has examined which games were popular in the 17th century and who played what using a prominent example. Because in the care of the museum of his university is the Augsburger Kunstkabinett, a collection of curiosities and games that was put together by the Augsburg art dealer Pilipp Hainhofer in the early 17th century. In the cabinet he collected objects from all over the world, from exotic mussel shells to minerals and animal relics to parts of scientific instruments, fossils – and the figures and accessories of numerous board games.
“Exploring games is one way of getting closer to the people who came before us,” says Sundin. “The frustration over unsuccessful dice throws must have been hardly less in 1620 than in 2020.” In 1632 the city of Augsburg donated the Augsburg Art Cabinet to the Swedish King Gustav Adolph, which brought it to Sweden. The cabinet is still considered to be one of the best preserved collections of its kind. Sundin therefore took the opportunity to use this and other game collections preserved in Europe to examine more closely which games were in vogue at the time and whether the figures and game boards in the cabinets were only exhibits were or whether they were actually played to pass the time in the 17th century.
“Hell trip” with cards and pawns
The historian comes to the conclusion that the aristocratic and wealthy owners of the art cabinets also regularly used the games contained therein. As an indication of this, he evaluates, among other things, the easily accessible placement of the games in these cabinets, but also the subtle signs of use. As part of his research, Sundin was also able to solve a 300-year-old riddle in the Augsburg Art Cabinet. Because in it was a game board that could not be clearly assigned to any game before. What to play with and how has remained unclear so far. This game board was also described in Sweden in 1694, but even then the rules of the game had been forgotten.
As Sundin found out, the imaginatively decorated game board comes from a game known in German as “Go to hell”, in which card and board games were combined. The players used cards and moved their pieces on the board in parallel, depending on how they were cut. Depending on which square the figure landed on, the player had to follow certain rules – for example, remain silent for a round or address his teammates in a certain way. If a player violated this rule, his figure was placed one space further in the middle – and thus moved one step closer to being cooked in the “hell pot”. Who landed in this one lost, the last player won the bet.
Source: Uppsala University, Swedish Research Council; Specialized publication: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2020