10 OLDEST Board Games In History

7. Go (2300 BCE)

Ah excellent, a game you’ve heard of. A game of such resounding endurance and quality that it’s been played continuously for over four thousand years. Like any good abstract game, the rules are simple to learn but hard to master. A checkered board, players take it in turns to put down a  stone of their colour, trying to lock off areas of the board with lines of their colour, netting them points at the end, or surrounding their opponents stones, capturing them and netting points immediately. A sprawling, brain-burning, cavalcade of options and aggression, Go absolutely stomps Chess to death in terms of complexity, and as an esteeming scholarly pursuit, the history of Go can be traced throughout Chinese aristocracy for millennia. Mastery of Go was seen as one of the four cultivated arts of chinese scholars along with calligraphy, painting, and playing the guquin (goo-cheen). The earliest written record of Go dates back to the 4th century BCE, but its origins are shrouded in myth, the most common being it was invented by the legendary Chinese Emperor Yao, who reigned as far back as 2300 BCE. Goodness.