Games Britannia - DwD

Games Britannia - Dicing With Destiny

Hey followers.

This time, our group was sat down to watch a Program all about Games. Naturally, I was ecstatic; would we perchance watch Player, Pwned or perhaps a Live event from some Gaming convention Lecture? Yeah, I didn’t think so, and it turns out I had the wrong kind of games.

So what we got was the show Games Britannia, which explored the History of Games, visa vi Board Games. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not what you would call an avid board games player, in fact I find them a tad droll myself, but we had to watch it so what can you do.

So In episode one, of a three part series, our personal Historian – Benjamin Woolley – was introduced to us and we followed him around as he traced the history of board games and old fashioned games, right back to the oldest game ever discovered.

We got to see how the die came about and that spinners were always used beforehand, and have recently come back into style again. We even got to see how the Board games were nearly wiped out by the church (as most good stuff was during the Middle Ages) because they contained dice which were attributing to the Devil. Then we saw that (in Europe) games almost never recovered, but fortunately when the first Crusaders came back they brought games of the Middle east, such as Chess, Early Snakes and Ladders, Gambling (cards and dice) and various other games. Games that involved the use of the brain and strategies became more and more popular because of how they helped one craft battle tactics (there were a lot of wars going on back then).

My personal favourite to see was the very first snakes and ladders, which was a Hindu based game that was less about the snakes and ladders and was actually about ascension of a man. He could rise up to the most powerful human figure, a king, before being able to ascend into other aspects of the Hindu religion before finally reaching Enlightenment. It wasn’t the fastest game to watch (good god it took forever!) but the ideas and aspect you could get just from looking at the board (which itself was like 500 squares aka huge).

It was actually… worth watching. I mean, yes it can get a little boring at points, and Mr Woolley certainly has a tone about him that, while not wholly unlikeable, still makes one’s eyelids droop. But aside from that, there is a great deal of information that is presented and the places that Benjamin visits are fantastic to see. Like where he visits this grand hall of chess where educated people have been meeting up to have a world championship chess tournament ( as well as seeing the first prise which is a beautiful set of crafted chess pieces). There was a church that still had markings from yesteryear where the kids would play a version of three in a row. I have in fact seen a few of these old timey games in the new Assassin’s Creed Video game, so that was nice to see.

So all in all, I did enjoy the program, though it was a bit slow in places and I still remain firmly in the “against” team when it comes to board games.