ancientgames.org

Macau is the largest gambling market in the world by gaming revenue — by a margin so wide that the second-largest market (the Las Vegas Strip) takes in less than a fifth of what Macau processes in a normal year. The reason is not chance. Macau is the only place in the Chinese-speaking world where commercial gambling has been legal continuously since the mid-19th century, and ...

If you have ever played craps and wondered why the rules are so complicated — why a “shooter” rolls until something specific happens, why some numbers are “naturals” and others “craps”, why the language sounds half-medieval — the short answer is that craps is the simplified American version of an English game called Hazard, which itself is the European descen...

In 1972, archaeologists excavating an aristocratic Han-dynasty tomb in Mawangdui, near Changsha in Hunan province, opened a sealed lacquer box and recovered what is now considered the most complete surviving set of one of the most important board games of ancient China. The set was a complete Liubo board, with twelve playing pieces, six bamboo throwing sticks, and a small acc...

Sic Bo’s three-dice shaker is the visible end of a tradition that runs back at least two thousand years through Chinese gaming history — and the dice themselves are not even close to the oldest piece of that tradition. Long before cubic dice arrived in China from the Greco-Roman world, gambling in Han-dynasty courts ran on bone tiles, lacquered boards with cosmological grids,...

Most ancient board games are still playable today — sometimes through interactive web recreations, sometimes through downloadable mobile apps, sometimes through faithful reconstruction kits sold by museums. The tricky part is knowing which versions are historically accurate versus which are loose modern adaptations using the name. This guide covers the major ...