People often collect things for different reasons, and the classic board games of the late 1800s is a perfect example. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the husband-and-wife team of Arthur and Ellen Liman scoured flea markets, attic sales, and auctions in search of these remnants from the past after purchasing an old British puzzle map for six dollars at a yard sale in 1980. By the end of the twentieth century, they had amassed over 500 board games, although their individual motives didn’t necessarily overlap.
“I’m an artist, so I was interested in the visual presentation of the material,” Ellen Liman explained to the Yale News in January 2019. “Because of the visual component, they are like little works of art. But my husband, who was very intellectual, was drawn to them because they are relics of history.”
In 2000, Ellen Liman donated 500 board games from her collection to the New-York Historical Society. Two years later, the New-York Historical Society Museum premiered an exhibit entitled The Games We Played that contained over 100 of those games, and the museum has continued to highlight the collection ever since with a steady rotation of board games on display at any given time.
“The Liman Collection constitutes a rich resource for exploring our changing values, aspirations, and prejudices, and for revealing the myriad ways that political events, technological achievements, and ordinary domestic life were revealed in the games people played,” Kenneth T. Jackson, who served as president of the New-York Historical Society at the time, wrote in the accompanying exhibit catalogue from the original exhibit. “Whatever its theme, each game in some ways reflects the customs and concerns of middle and upper-class Americans, who were dealing with immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization a century or more ago.”
Board games have been part of the human experience for thousands of years, with the earliest – Senet – found in burial tombs of Ancient Egypt that date back to 3100 BC. Checkers were played in both Ancient Greece and Rome, meanwhile, while Parcheesi originated in sixteenth century India.
Despite the popularity of board games in Great Britain, they did not initially make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Puritan beliefs in America held that “idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” while the hard work associated with agrarian life left little time for leisure pleasures. As the puritans began to have less sway over American mores and the population shifted from rural to urban, however, life in the United States became less rigid, with home becoming just as important as work.
Nineteenth century houses reflected this change with the growing importance of the parlor room. The parlor room was the epicenter of domestic life, a place where the family could gather, converse, read, and write. Because of limited lighting at the time, parlor rooms contained a large, circular table in the center which quickly became a symbol of the family circle. It was also the ideal location to play board games.
Options were initially limited, with the first known American board game – Traveller’s Tour through the United States – appearing in 1822. Other games produced at the time were either reproductions of, or directly based on, popular games from England.
Early board games were individually hand-colored, adding to their scarcity. The advent of chromolithography, which greatly reduced the time needed to reproduce color prints, led to board game production on a much larger scale and launched the Golden Age of Board Games in the United States during the 1880s.
These board games reflected the needs, expectations, and moral philosophy of their times. Many children were still being taught at home in the late 1800s, while an influx of immigrants added to the number of children needing to be educated. Games were thus used as basic growth tools, with building blocks improving coordination, puzzles helping with dexterity, and games based on fairy tales providing a moral compass.
History, literature, and geography were also popular themes for board games. The World’s Educator contained over two thousand questions on both history and current affairs, and a plethora of map puzzles introduced children to the geography of the United States. In Authors, meanwhile, players built “suits” of cards that contained a specific author and the major works they had written. The success of the game led to other variations, including Musical Authors, The Game of Mythology, and Gems of Art.
Early board games also emphasized moral values – such a Mansion of Happiness, in which players maneuvered around a board that rewarded them for landing on spaces marked with piety, honesty, and humility while being penalized for spaces designated with cruelty, immodesty and ingratitude – but later faced competition from the emerging concept of materialism.
The Game of District Messenger Boy, for instance, followed one’s progress from mere gopher within a fictitious company to president of the firm. Bulls and Bears, on the other hand, was based on the Wall Street stock market, while Monopolist featured “the great battle between Capital and Labor.” All of these games shared the same sense of entrepreneurial optimism and beliefs in a competitive marketplace.
Other changes in American life were also represented within the board games of the late 1800s. With the Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, and Spanish-American War all erupting in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was only natural that games centered on war and American patriotism would become popular. The emergence of baseball as a national pastime likewise led to board games with a sports-theme, while the ease that railroads made travel within the United States gave rise to The Game of Phoebe Snow, in which players embarked on a board game journey from New York City to San Francisco.
The Golden Age of Board Games ended in the 1920s with the birth of radio but board games have continued to remain popular nonetheless. Many modern games are even direct descendants of those from the nineteenth century. Monopoly is a contemporary combination of Monopolist and Bulls and Bears, while The Checkered Game of Life – in which players followed a checkerboard path through the various stages of life as opposed to a swerving pattern – is now The Game of Life. Even The World’s Educator has been updated as Trivial Pursuit. While the names may have changed, however, the historical connections to their times remain the same.
“As the informal face of culture, games offer less self-consciousness, and hence more accurate, revelations about the society they entertained,” The Games We Played exhibit catalogue explains. “They reveal the hopes and fears of Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, just as today’s popular games – Monopoly, Cranium, and even Pokémon – will reveal those of Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century to future generations.”
Until that day arrives, the Arthur and Ellen Liman Collection at the New-York Historical Society Museum serves as testament to how board games are more than just mere games and are a historical record of the past as well.
Anthony Letizia