Tables: Medieval Board Games

In 1983 archaeologists digging the ruins of the Norman castle at Gloucester found 150 pieces of carved bone at the bottom of a rubbish pit. Together they made a complete gaming set from about the year 1100: a board of 24 points and thirty counters, fifteen of red deer skull and fifteen of antler, each carved with a different scene. A centaur. A manticore. An elephant. Samson wrestling the lion. It is the oldest complete set ever found for the game the Middle Ages called Tables, and someone smashed it with an axe before throwing it away. This app is five games that board could have hosted, reconstructed from the manuscripts that describe them. THE GAMES Ludus Anglicorum, the English Game, described in a manuscript written in England before 1333 and said to be the most popular game of Chaucer's day. Three dice, one of which always counts as a six. All fifteen men start on a single point, and you may only hold points on the far side of the board. Win by bearing off, or by trapping your opponent in the positions the manuscript calls lympolding and lurching. Pyf, the Roman and Byzantine game. Every man starts off the board, both sides race the same way round, and three dice decide it. This is the game the poet Agathias watched Emperor Zeno lose in the 480s, on a throw of two, five and six that broke every one of his pairs. Irish, the direct parent of backgammon, from seventeenth-century England. The setup you know, but doubles count once, and there is no doubling cube and no gammon. Brandubh, the Irish game of the Ballinderry board, a yew plank of 49 peg holes pulled from a lake dwelling in County Westmeath and dated to the tenth century. A king and four men break for the corners against eight attackers. Games are short and the first mistake usually settles it. Tablut, the only game of its family whose rules were ever written down. Carl Linnaeus recorded them in Lapland in 1732, watching the Sami play. A king and eight defenders against sixteen attackers, and the king goes free at any edge. PLAYING Play against another person on the same device, or against the computer at three strengths. The computer knows every rule, searches properly rather than moving at random, and will punish a loose blot. Every game carries its own rules screen and a page on the archaeology behind it, written in plain language. Tapping a piece that cannot move tells you which rule is stopping it, so the medieval rules are learnable rather than mysterious. There are no accounts, no advertising, no in-app purchases and no internet connection. The app collects nothing and asks for no permissions. SOURCES The two medieval reconstructions follow Shelagh Lewins's work in Tabula at Rumwoldstow (2021), built on Ulrich Schadler's transcription of British Library manuscript Royal 13 A XVIII and on the Libro de los Juegos of Alfonso X. Irish follows Justin du Coeur's reconstruction of Francis Willughby's Volume of Plaies. Where the sources are ambiguous the app takes the reading those authors recommend, and says so in the rules screens. The Gloucester set is in the Museum of Gloucester. The Ballinderry board is in the National Museum of Ireland.