150 Fun Facts About Board Games

In London Monopoly, which property occupies the Boardwalk slot as the most expensive square?

Mayfair, a district and not a street, sits beside Park Lane in the dark-blue set; Waddingtons boss Victor Watson and his secretary Marjory Phillips picked the London names on a 1935 day trip from Leeds.

In Catan, which resource do pasture hexes produce?

Wool comes from Catan's pasture hexes and helps pay for settlements and development cards, but roads and cities never need it, so a player rich in pasture still has to trade.

How many squares are on a standard chessboard?

64 squares make up the 8x8 board; in the old wheat-and-chessboard puzzle, one grain on the first square, doubled on each square after, adds up to more than 18 quintillion grains.

Which letter shares the top tile value of 10 points with Z in English-language Scrabble?

Q and Z are the only 10-point tiles; inventor Alfred Butts set the values by counting how often each letter turned up in newspapers such as The New York Times.

Sir Leonard Woolley unearthed boards for which ancient pastime while excavating a Sumerian cemetery?

The Royal Game of Ur: Woolley unearthed five boards in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, and Irving Finkel later reconstructed its rules from a Babylonian tablet dated 177 BC.

Which game won the first Spiel des Jahres, Germany's Game of the Year, in 1979?

Hare & Tortoise won as Hase und Igel, hare and hedgehog: the German edition followed the Brothers Grimm version of the fable, in which a hedgehog is the one who outwits the hare.

In Carcassonne, what is a follower called when it is laid on its side instead of standing upright?

A farmer lies down as a reminder that it stays in its field for the rest of the game; fields score only at the end, three points for each completed city they touch.

In Ticket to Ride, what happens at game end to destination tickets a player failed to complete?

Their points are subtracted: each unfinished destination ticket costs its face value at game end, and kept tickets can never be discarded, so late ticket draws are a gamble.

In Risk, which continent can be invaded through only one territory, making it the easiest to hold?

Australia can be attacked only through Indonesia, so one fortified border guards all four of its territories; the catch is a bonus of just two armies a turn.

In Pandemic, every player's pawn starts in which US city, home to the first research station?

Atlanta is where every pawn and the first research station begin, a nod to the real Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has its headquarters there.

From which country does the ancient strategy board game Go originate?

China is where Go began more than 2,500 years ago; it had reached Korea by the 5th century and Japan by the 7th, and the West later took the game's short name from Japanese.

Which German publisher first released Catan in 1995?

Kosmos, a Stuttgart book publisher founded in 1822 that moved into science kits in the 1920s and only later into games, released Catan in 1995.

Which 2014 Marc André game has players collecting gem chips as Renaissance merchants?

Splendor's gem chips buy development cards, and every card then counts as a permanent gem of its own, so late in the game a player can buy cards without spending a single chip.

Which chess piece can move any number of squares diagonally, horizontally, or vertically?

The Queen combines the rook's and bishop's moves, yet its medieval forerunner could step only one square diagonally; it gained its modern range in Spain in the 15th century.

What breed of dog is represented by the dog token in Monopoly?

The Scottish Terrier, or Scottie, has outlasted several fellow tokens: a 2013 fan vote retired the iron in favour of a cat, and the thimble, boot and wheelbarrow went in 2017.

Dungeons & Dragons is often credited with popularizing which type of die?

D20 dice are far older than the game that made them famous: twenty-sided dice survive from Ptolemaic Egypt, some two thousand years before Dungeons & Dragons.

In the cooperative card game Hanabi, how do players hold their hands?

Outward, visible only to others: each Hanabi player sees every hand but their own, so the game is all about which of a few permitted clues to give; it won the 2013 Spiel des Jahres.

Which 2019 engine-building game by Elizabeth Hargrave has players filling forest, grassland and wetland habitats on their boards?

Wingspan's 170 bird cards take their powers from real species data; Hargrave, an amateur birder, said she chose the theme because there were too many games about castles and space.

Which guessing game was played on pencil-and-paper grids for decades before Milton Bradley's plastic version of 1967?

Battleship was computerised in the 1970s, when Milton Bradley built a microprocessor into it and sold it as Electronic Battleship, a pioneer among the chip-driven toys of that decade.

In chess, which special move slides a king two squares towards a rook that then hops over it?

Castling is the only move that shifts two pieces at once, and it is illegal while the king is in check or would cross an attacked square, so it cannot be used to flee an attack.

Which designer created Spirit Island, the 2017 cooperative game in which players are spirits defending an island from colonising invaders?

R. Eric Reuss designed Spirit Island as an answer to the many games that cast players as the colonisers, and he made the invader pieces white on purpose.

Which game designer created the whimsical board game Takenoko, featuring a panda and bamboo gardens?

Antoine Bauza, who also designed 7 Wonders and Hanabi, set Takenoko in a Japanese emperor's garden, where a gardener grows the bamboo and a panda, a gift from the Chinese emperor, eats it.

Who co-designed the Kickstarter-funded winemaking game Viticulture with Alan Stone?

Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone raised about $65,000 for Viticulture on Kickstarter in 2012 and set up Stonemaier Games so that they could publish it themselves.

Which game designer is credited with creating the imaginative card-based game Dixit?

Jean-Louis Roubira created Dixit, whose Latin title means 'he said' or 'she said': each round turns on what the storyteller says about a wordless picture card; it won the 2010 Spiel des Jahres.

Which game, patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904, was the forerunner of Monopoly?

The Landlord's Game was built to teach Henry George's single-tax ideas by showing how rents enrich landlords; Parker Brothers bought Magie's patent in 1935.

In Catan, rolling a seven forces the active player to move which piece?

The robber blocks its new hex from producing anything; the mover also steals a card from a neighbour, and anyone holding more than seven cards discards half.

In which country is the game of chess widely believed to have originated?

India's chaturanga, played by the 6th century, was named for the four divisions of an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, the forerunners of today's pawns, knights, bishops and rooks.

In the original Ticket to Ride, what earns the 10-point end-game bonus?

The longest continuous route is worth 10 extra points at the end, and if several players tie for it, every one of them scores the full bonus.

Alfred Butts' word game carried which name immediately before James Brunot renamed it Scrabble in 1948?

Criss-Crosswords added a board to Butts's earlier tile game Lexiko; Brunot's family made the first Scrabble sets in a converted Connecticut schoolhouse, 2,400 of them in 1949, and lost money.

By what name is the game of Go known in Korea?

Baduk is the Korean name for Go; Korea long played its own form, sunjang baduk, with a prescribed opening, until Japanese-style play replaced it in the early 20th century.

Which French film director, an Oscar winner for The Red Balloon, invented Risk?

Albert Lamorisse released it in France in 1957 as La Conquête du Monde; Parker Brothers brought it to America as Risk in 1959.

In which Matt Leacock cooperative game do players collect four treasures and escape by helicopter?

Forbidden Island sinks tile by tile as flood cards are drawn, and the whole team must reach Fools' Landing with the treasures to fly out, or everyone loses.

In 2011 the German Game of the Year jury created a separate prize for more complex games under what name?

Kennerspiel des Jahres, the connoisseur's game of the year, went first to 7 Wonders; before 2011 heavier games such as Agricola could hope only for an occasional special prize.

How many pawns does each player start with in a standard game of chess?

Each side starts with 8 pawns, half of its sixteen pieces; because any pawn that reaches the far rank is promoted, a player could in theory end up with nine queens.

Which game did Anthony Pratt first call Murder when he devised it in 1943?

Clue began as Murder, devised by Pratt during wartime air raids on Birmingham; Waddingtons renamed it Cluedo, a pun on clue and ludo, Latin for 'I play', and North America shortened that.

Which German designer created the tile-laying game Carcassonne, the 2001 Spiel des Jahres winner?

Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, a teacher by profession, named his tile game after the walled medieval town of Carcassonne in southern France; he also designed The Downfall of Pompeii.

Backgammon itself, a descendant of the older tables game Irish, is first recorded in the 17th century in which country?

England is where backgammon itself first appears, in the 17th century, although the wider family of tables games it belongs to goes back at least 1,600 years.

Which German designer created the farming-heavy strategy games Agricola, Caverna and A Feast for Odin?

Uwe Rosenberg was still a statistics student in Dortmund when his bean-trading card game Bohnanza became a hit in 1997, ten years before Agricola.

Which Andreas Seyfarth game has players developing plantations and shipping goods as colonial governors?

In Puerto Rico (2002) a player picks a role such as Builder and everyone then takes that action, the picker with a small privilege, so every choice also helps rivals.

Which chess opening begins 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5?

Ruy Lopez is named for a 16th-century Spanish priest who analysed it in a 1561 book; Black finds equality so hard to reach that it is nicknamed the Spanish Torture.

In Dixit, in which situation does the storyteller score nothing for the round?

When everyone or no one guesses right the storyteller scores nothing and every other player takes two points; the trick is a hint vague enough to fool some of the table but not all of it.

Which mechanic has players claim action spaces with a limited supply of tokens, blocking rivals from using them?

Worker placement was popularised by Caylus in 2005, though Keydom had used it as early as 1998; it then became a staple of games such as Agricola and Stone Age.

Who shares the creator credit for Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax?

Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign fed into the game TSR published in 1974; when he later sued over royalties, the settlement put both men's names on the box as co-creators.

Which cooperative dungeon-crawl board game by Isaac Childres uses a persistent world and card-based combat?

Gloomhaven replaces dice with cards: each round a player chooses two cards from a shrinking hand, and a character who runs out of cards is exhausted and drops out of the scenario.

In chess, what is the knight alone allowed to do?

The knight is the only piece that can jump over other pieces, which is why it is such a nuisance in cramped positions where bishops and rooks are boxed in.

Who is the designer of the popular railway-themed board game series, Ticket to Ride?

Alan R. Moon gave players only three things to do on a turn (draw cards, claim a route or take new tickets), which keeps turns short; it won him a second Spiel des Jahres in 2004.

Which Vlaada Chvátil party game has two teams identifying their secret agents from one-word spymaster clues?

Codenames lays out 25 word cards, one of which is the assassin: a team that touches it loses at once, so every broad hint is a gamble.

Who designed the influential board game Catan, first published in 1995?

Klaus Teuber was a dental technician who designed games as a hobby; Catan was his fourth Spiel des Jahres winner, and its sales let him give up the dental lab.

Which 19th-century tile game, often compared to rummy, is usually played with 144 tiles?

Mahjong and its 144 tiles reached America after Joseph Babcock, an oil-company man posted to Suzhou, wrote simplified English rules in 1920, the version played through the fad of the 1920s.

What is the chess capture a pawn may make only right after an enemy pawn's two-square advance called?

En passant stops a pawn from using its double step to slip past an enemy pawn that could otherwise have taken it.

Which 2008 card game by Donald X. Vaccarino pioneered the deck-building mechanic?

Dominion starts everyone with the same ten cards, seven Coppers and three Estates; the victory cards needed to win usually do nothing during play, so each one bought clogs the deck.

Which luck-driven mechanic sends a piece along a track in Monopoly, Ludo and Snakes & Ladders?

Roll-and-move at its purest, as in Snakes & Ladders, leaves players no decisions at all, so sheer luck picks the winner; Monopoly at least adds choices about what to buy.

Which genre, marked by indirect conflict and no player elimination, did Catan popularise beyond its home continent after 1995?

Eurogames grew up in postwar Germany, where games that glorified violence were frowned on, which is partly why the genre settles its rivalries through trading and building instead of battle.

Which 2016 Stonemaier game set in an alternate 1920s Europa blends engine-building, area control and mechs?

Scythe is set in Jakub Różalski's 1920+ world, an alternate Europe patrolled by dieselpunk combat mechs; the same world was later used for Iron Harvest, a 2020 strategy video game.

What is the standard grid size of a full-size Go board used in tournament play?

19x19 lines give 361 points, because stones sit on the intersections and not inside the squares; archaeological finds show that early boards were only 17x17.

What chess term describes a drawn position where the player to move has no legal moves but is not in check?

Stalemate has been a draw everywhere only since the 19th century; one rule in force from about 1600 to 1800 made it a loss for the player who delivered it.

The original 2004 Ticket to Ride board covers which region?

United States and Southern Canada fill the first map, and its success led to a Europe edition a year later and then to maps of regions from the Nordic countries to India.

Which Jacob Fryxelius board game has rival corporations competing on the Red Planet?

Terraforming Mars ends once temperature, oxygen and oceans all reach their targets, so each step a player takes to raise them also brings the end closer for every rival.

In chess, what is it called when a king is under attack and has no legal way to escape?

Checkmate comes from the Persian shah mat, often translated as 'the king is helpless'; the king is never actually captured, because the game ends the moment mate is delivered.

What shape are the resource-bearing terrain tiles in the board game Catan?

Hexagonal tiles mean three hexes meet at every corner, so one settlement can collect from up to three terrains; the 19 hexes are laid out afresh for a different island each game.

Which Michael Kiesling board game has players draft and place tiles to create mosaic patterns?

Azul takes its theme from azulejos, the painted tiles King Manuel I admired at the Alhambra and ordered for his own palace; players are the artists tiling the royal palace at Evora.

What is the term for a board game whose components, rules and story change permanently across sessions?

A legacy game changes permanently between plays; Rob Daviau's Risk Legacy (2011) introduced the format, with players tearing up cards and writing on the board for good.

Who designed the dice game King of Tokyo, in which giant monsters battle for control of Tokyo?

Richard Garfield, the mathematician behind Magic: The Gathering, built King of Tokyo on Yahtzee-style rolling: up to three throws of six dice a turn, keeping whichever you like.

Which digital sandbox lets players push virtual pieces around under a physics engine to play almost any board game?

Tabletop Simulator, released on Steam by Berserk Games in 2015, has no built-in victory conditions; it simulates a physics table and leaves the rules to the humans.

Which words did Catan drop from its title in a 2015 rebrand for its 20th anniversary?

The Settlers of was dropped so that the game would be plain Catan in every country and language; the expansions were retitled to match, Seafarers of Catan becoming Catan: Seafarers.

In chess, what is promoting a pawn to a knight, rook or bishop rather than a queen called?

Underpromotion usually means choosing a knight, for a check or fork that a queen could not give; picking a rook or bishop is rarer and is mostly done to avoid stalemating the opponent.

Which company publishes the Ticket to Ride series of board games?

Days of Wonder was only two years old when it launched the game in 2004 and sold 250,000 copies in nine months; Asmodee bought the company in 2014.

Which website, launched in 2000, ranks thousands of tabletop games by its users' 1-to-10 ratings?

BoardGameGeek was started in January 2000 by Scott Alden and Derk Solko; its users add the games themselves and rate each one from 1 to 10, and those votes produce the site's ranked list.

Which 4th-century BCE text holds the earliest written reference to the game of Go?

The Zuo Zhuan, an annal compiled around the 4th century BCE, mentions the game, then called yì, while recounting an event of 548 BCE.

Which mate, the quickest possible in chess, lets Black win on the second move?

Fool's mate needs White to open with two bad pawn moves on the f- and g-files, which lets Black's queen give mate on move two; Scholar's mate takes four.

Trivial Pursuit was dreamed up in 1979 by two journalists in which Canadian city?

Montreal: Chris Haney of the Montreal Gazette and Scott Abbott of The Canadian Press sketched the game out there in about 45 minutes on 15 December 1979.

Jenga takes its name from a verb meaning 'to build' in which language?

Swahili: jenga means 'build'; designer Leslie Scott grew up speaking it in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and the tower starts with 54 blocks.

Eleanor Abbott designed Candy Land in 1948 while recovering from which disease?

Polio: Abbott, a San Diego schoolteacher, devised Candy Land in a polio ward in 1948 and gave the children there a game needing no reading; Milton Bradley published it in 1949.

What was the title of the first board game Milton Bradley published, in 1860?

The Checkered Game of Life sent players from Infancy to Happy Old Age across a checkerboard with a Suicide square; in 1960 it was reworked into the spinner-and-cars Game of Life.

Twister took off in 1966 after Eva Gabor played it on air with which talk-show host?

Johnny Carson played it with Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show in May 1966; the game had been developed under the name Pretzel before Milton Bradley renamed it Twister.

John Spinello sold his Operation prototype to Marvin Glass in 1964 for how much?

$500 was all Spinello received for Operation, along with a promised job at Marvin Glass that never came; Milton Bradley published the game in 1965.

In Stratego, which piece is the only one that can capture the Marshal by attacking it?

The Spy, the lowest-ranked piece, captures the Marshal only when it attacks; if the Marshal or anything else strikes it first, the Spy loses.

Japanese salesman Goro Hasegawa patented which board game in 1971, a variant of the Victorian game Reversi?

Othello took its name from Shakespeare's play, the black and white discs echoing its drama of a black general and his white wife; the toy firm Tsukuda launched it in Japan in 1973.

What did the 1988 solution of Connect Four prove?

The first player can force a win by starting in the centre column; James Dow Allen and Victor Allis reached the result independently in October 1988, about two weeks apart.

Guess Who? was first released in 1979 as Wie is het? in which language?

Dutch was the game's first language, and co-inventor Theo Coster was born in Amsterdam, where he was a classmate of Anne Frank; he and his wife Ora invented about 200 toys and games.

Which IBM computer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 rematch in New York?

Deep Blue won the rematch 3½–2½ after Kasparov had beaten it in Philadelphia a year earlier; the loss became the documentary Game Over.

Which 9-dan Go professional lost 4-1 to DeepMind's AlphaGo in March 2016?

Lee Sedol's single win came in game four, when his wedge at move 78 was hailed as a 'divine move' the program had not foreseen; AlphaGo took the Seoul series 4–1.

Which peg game did postmaster Mordecai Meirowitz invent in 1970?

Mastermind was turned down by the leading toy companies before Invicta Plastics, a small English firm from the Leicester area, picked it up at the Nuremberg toy fair and bought the rights outright.

Which seven-player game of alliances and betrayal in 1901 Europe uses no dice at all?

Diplomacy: Allan Calhamer paid for the first 500-copy print run himself in 1959 after publishers rejected it; orders are written secretly and resolved without dice.

The tile game Rummikub became the best-selling export game of which country?

Israel: Romanian-born Ephraim Hertzano hand-made the first Rummikub sets with his family in his backyard after settling there in the 1940s, and sold them door to door.

The original US Monopoly board names its properties after streets in and around where?

Atlantic City, New Jersey: Boardwalk, Park Place and the rest are its streets, and Marvin Gardens is a misspelling of the real Marven Gardens that has survived on the board for decades.

In WWII, what did British intelligence have Waddingtons hide in Monopoly sets for POWs?

Silk escape maps went in alongside real money, a compass and a file, sent through fake POW relief charities; Waddingtons was chosen because it could print on silk.

In North American Scrabble, what is a play using all seven rack tiles called?

A bingo earns a 50-point bonus, so experts study six-letter 'stems' such as AEINST, which makes a seven-letter word with 24 of the 26 letters.

In backgammon, what is the die marked 2 to 64 that players use to raise the stakes called?

The doubling cube, which first appeared in New York gaming clubs in the 1920s, lets a player offer to double the stakes: the opponent must accept or give up the game on the spot.

Which Cluedo suspect traditionally had the advantage of moving first?

Miss Scarlett traditionally moved first, an edge modern editions removed by letting the highest roller start; North American sets spelled her name Scarlet from 1963 until 2016.

How many territories make up the world map on a standard Risk board?

They are grouped into six continents, and the current edition links them with 83 attack routes.

Which 2015 card game co-created by The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman set a Kickstarter record for the most backers?

Exploding Kittens asked for $10,000 and closed with about $8.78 million in pledges from 219,382 backers, at the time the most backers of any Kickstarter project.

Gen Con, the tabletop convention Gary Gygax founded in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, moved in 2003 to which city?

Indianapolis took the show over from Milwaukee, its home since 1985; the first one was held in Lake Geneva's Horticultural Hall in 1968, and the name is a pun on the Geneva Conventions.

Which Bruno Cathala tile game of 5x5 grids won the 2017 Spiel des Jahres?

Kingdomino lays its dominoes out in numbered order, and whoever takes the most valuable one picks last next round; anything that will not fit a player's 5x5 grid is discarded.

Which 2005 GMT Games title has the US and USSR fighting the Cold War with event cards?

Twilight Struggle takes its title from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, which spoke of 'a long twilight struggle'; Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews built its cards on real Cold War events.

Which Friedemann Friese game, Funkenschlag in Germany, began with players drawing networks in crayon?

Power Grid swapped the crayons for a fixed map of city connections in 2004; players still bid for power plants and buy the fuel to run them, and whoever lights the most cities wins.

In shogi, what may players do with captured pieces?

Players may drop them onto the board as their own on a later turn; one theory links the rule to 15th-century mercenaries who changed sides when captured instead of being killed.

Sid Sackson's 1964 hotel-merger game from 3M's bookshelf series is called what?

Acquire reached 3M under the title Vacation, and 3M suggested the new name; players grow hotel chains tile by tile and cash in when a bigger chain swallows a smaller one.

The standard chess set design, first sold by Jaques of London in 1849, is named for whom?

Howard Staunton, the leading English master of the day, endorsed the design and hand-signed the first 500 sets; it was registered in 1849 under the name of Nathaniel Cooke.

What was the real secret of the Turk, the chess-playing 'automaton' first shown in 1770?

A human master hidden inside worked the Turk, which Wolfgang von Kempelen built in 1770 to impress Empress Maria Theresa; it went on to beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.

Which video game company, co-founded by Nolan Bushnell in 1972, is named after a term from the board game Go?

Atari is the Go term for stones that can be captured on the next move. Bushnell weighed several terms from the game before choosing it for his new company.

Under the official rules of Monopoly, what happens when a player declines to buy an unowned property they land on?

It goes to auction at once, and every player may bid, including the one who just turned it down. Dropping the auction is one of the most common house rules.

Fingerprints left on a Monopoly set, used with real stolen cash at a farm hideout, helped solve which British crime?

The Great Train Robbery gang wiped down Leatherslade Farm but missed prints on a ketchup bottle and on the Monopoly set, which they had played with real banknotes from the £2.61 million haul.

Milton Bradley turned to board games after his print of which presidential candidate suddenly went out of date?

Abraham Lincoln grew his distinctive beard after Bradley's print went on sale, and customers demanded their money back. Hunting for a new product, Bradley copied the idea of a board game a friend had given him.

A 1984 lawsuit accused Trivial Pursuit of copying a planted fake fact about which TV detective's first name?

Columbo was given the invented first name "Philip" in a trivia book as a trap for copycats, and the game repeated it. The courts still sided with the game's makers, since facts cannot be copyrighted.

Which cartoonist's chain-reaction contraptions inspired the game Mouse Trap, though its makers paid him no royalties?

Rube Goldberg, elderly and near retirement, chose not to sue, because inspiration and ideas cannot be protected by copyright or patent. Mouse Trap's designer went on to base two more games on his drawings.

Which accessory do many people falsely remember Monopoly's mascot wearing, a classic case of the Mandela effect?

A monocle is the false memory: the mascot, long known as Rich Uncle Pennybags, was drawn without one for decades. Even so, a 1995 Ace Ventura film has Jim Carrey call a monocled man "the Monopoly guy".

Which pop singer made her feature film debut as a sailor in a 2012 movie based on the game Battleship?

Rihanna made her acting debut fighting an alien invasion in Battleship, a film spun from a guessing game played with pencil and paper since around World War I.

Which Monopoly space pays out a cash jackpot under a popular house rule, though officially nothing happens there?

Free Parking is only a resting place in the official rules. The jackpot variant sends tax and card payments to the middle of the board for whoever lands there next.

Which Founding Father wrote the 1786 essay "The Morals of Chess" and is in the US Chess Hall of Fame?

Benjamin Franklin had played chess since at least 1733 and wrote that foresight, circumspection and caution can all be learnt from the game. He also urged players to point out an opponent's mistakes.

Twister reached Milton Bradley under which working name, dropped because a rival's toy dog held the trademark?

Pretzel was designer Neil Rabens's name for the game, but Transogram already owned it for a toy dog, so Milton Bradley's team rechristened it Twister.

Nigel Richards, who won a French-language Scrabble world title without speaking French, comes from which country?

New Zealand is where Richards was born, in Christchurch. He reportedly spent just nine weeks studying the French dictionary before taking the 2015 title.

Which Philadelphian became a millionaire by selling Monopoly to Parker Brothers, who marketed him as its sole inventor?

Charles Darrow had come across an existing game and made changes to it, and historians now see him as just one of its final developers. Within a year, 20,000 sets were being made every week.

In Monopoly, rolling which result three times in a row sends a player straight to jail?

Doubles normally earn a player another turn, but the third pair in a row means going directly to jail without completing the move.

Which letter is the only one worth exactly five points in a standard English Scrabble set?

K is the only five-point tile, and the bag holds just one of it. J and X score eight each, while V is worth four.

In Scrabble, each game's first word must cover the centre square, which is usually marked with what symbol?

A star marks the centre square, which counts as a double word score, so the opening play is always worth twice its face value.

In classic British editions of Cluedo, the victim known to North American players as Mr. Boddy has what name?

Dr. Black is the victim on British boards, while North America got the punning Mr. Boddy. A 2023 refresh merged the two names into Boden "Boddy" Black Jr.

Which actor played Wadsworth the butler in a 1985 film comedy based on the board game Clue?

Tim Curry led a film that reached cinemas with three different endings, each screening showing only one of the possible solutions to the whodunit.

Which continent on the Risk board has the most access points, five, yet pays the biggest army bonus?

Asia hands its owner seven extra armies every turn, more than any other continent, but its twelve territories can be invaded through five separate entry points.

In classic Trivial Pursuit, which colour wedge does a player earn for the History category?

Yellow stands for History, beside blue for Geography, pink for Entertainment, green for Science & Nature and orange for Sports & Leisure. Art & Literature began brown and later turned purple.

What do the British call checkers, a name also used for the international form played on a 10×10 board?

Draughts is the British English name, and the international version is a bigger game: a 10×10 board on which kings can fly any number of squares.

Which family of board games, among the oldest still played, has players sow seeds or stones around rows of pits?

Mancala needs so little equipment that a board can be holes scooped in the earth, with pebbles, beans or seeds as counters. Its name comes from Arabic.

Which Robin Williams film, based on a Chris Van Allsburg picture book, centres on a supernatural jungle board game?

Jumanji unleashes a new jungle hazard with every roll, and Williams plays a man who was sucked into the game as a boy and trapped there for 26 years.

In which capital city did Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky for the world chess title in 1972?

Reykjavík staged the so-called Match of the Century, which Fischer won 12½–8½ to interrupt a 24-year run of Soviet world champions.

Which mathematician, later the subject of A Beautiful Mind, rediscovered the board game Hex while at Princeton?

John Nash's fellow players called the game Nash, or simply John, because it could be played on bathroom tiles. Danish poet Piet Hein had invented it first, in 1942.

Which ancient Egyptian board game, found in Tutankhamun's tomb, has a name that means "passing"?

Senet was played on a board of thirty squares, and by the New Kingdom it had come to stand for the soul's passage through the underworld.

Othello, patented in 1971, is a variant of which Victorian game whose two rival inventors each called the other a fraud?

Reversi appeared in 1883, when Lewis Waterman and John Mollett both claimed to have invented it. Othello's main change is a fixed starting position.

Ludo and Sorry! are both commercial versions of which centuries-old game played on a cross-shaped board?

Pachisi is traditionally played on embroidered cloth with cowrie shells thrown as dice, and it is named after the number twenty-five, the biggest score one throw can make.

In Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a knight returning from the Crusades challenges which figure to a chess match?

Death accepts the challenge, and the knight believes he will survive for as long as their game continues. The story unfolds in a medieval Sweden ravaged by plague.

Which University of Alberta computer program proved in 2007 that perfectly played checkers ends in a draw?

Chinook had already become the first program to win a world title against humans, in 1994, though it never won a match against the great champion Marion Tinsley.

Which 1985 party game, invented by Robert Angel, was inspired by charades but swaps acting for a pencil?

Pictionary nearly missed its launch: the printer could not sort its 500,000 cards, so Angel and his partners collated them by hand over six days.

Which 1998 party game, first sold through Starbucks and Amazon, has players sculpt answers from purple clay?

Cranium was created by Whit Alexander and Richard Tait, and selling a board game through coffee shops and an online bookseller was a novel idea at the time.

Which 1989 party game hands a rival a buzzer or squeaker to catch a clue-giver's slips of the tongue?

Taboo cards print a target word above five banned ones, so a player cueing "baseball" may not say sport, game, pastime, hitter or pitcher.

Which Parker Brothers word game begins with a player shaking a covered tray of 16 lettered dice?

Boggle grew from a prototype Allan Turoff built in 1969, which Parker Brothers first turned down. It finally launched beside two forgotten sister games, Fluster and Grapple.

Which board game, launched in America in 1965, rolls its single die inside a plastic Pop-O-Matic bubble?

Trouble's popping dome stops the die from being lost and players from cheating on the roll. British shops sell the same game under the name Frustration.

In the game Operation, the patient nicknamed Cavity Sam has what in place of an ordinary nose?

A red lightbulb forms Cavity Sam's nose. The game is a variant of the electrified wire-loop challenge once popular at fairs, played here with tweezers wired to the board.

Candy Land's storyline has players racing along the track to find which missing character?

King Kandy is the lost king players set out to find. He arrived only in 1984, when a revamp with new art first gave the game characters and a storyline.

Which 1965 Milton Bradley game has players open a plastic door hoping for a dreamboat rather than the "dud"?

Mystery Date hid a formal dance, bowling, beach or skiing partner behind its door, and one book called it Barbie crossed with the game show Let's Make a Deal.

Which toy company bought Milton Bradley in 1984 and gained Parker Brothers when it took over Tonka in 1991?

Hasbro began in 1923 as Hassenfeld Brothers, a firm selling textile remnants, and its name is a contraction of the original. Its first toys were modelling clay and doctor and nurse kits.

Which Latin word names the original general-knowledge edition of Trivial Pursuit, first released in Canada in 1981?

Genus, also written Genus I, was the first set of questions, and a Genus II followed. A lawsuit later claimed that over a quarter of its questions came from one author's trivia books.

Scrabble's name, chosen by James Brunot in 1948, is a real English word with which meaning?

To scratch frantically is what the everyday word scrabble means. A year after the renaming, Brunot and his family were making the sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Connecticut.

Parker Brothers, long the publisher of Monopoly and Clue, was founded in 1883 in which Massachusetts city?

Salem was the hometown of George S. Parker, who created his first game, Banking, at the age of 16. His brother joined the business in 1888, which gave the company its familiar name.

Which German city hosts Spiel, the huge public board game fair that began in 1983 and runs each October?

Essen gives the show its nickname, the Essen Game Fair. The four-day event drew 220,000 visitors in 2025, when exhibitors presented more than 1,700 new board games.

Anthony Pratt devised Cluedo at home during wartime air raids on which British city?

Birmingham was home to Pratt, a musician and factory worker, who drew on the whodunit parlour games his clients played at private music soirees and on the detective novels of Agatha Christie.

Which disc-flicking board game is traced to an 1876 board made in Perth County, Ontario, by Eckhardt Wettlaufer?

Crokinole's oldest known board is said to have been a fifth-birthday present for Wettlaufer's son Adam. His home town of Tavistock was later chosen to host the world championship.

By its publisher's account, Edwin S. Lowe got the rights to Yahtzee from its inventors in exchange for what?

A thousand gift sets was the price, by the publisher's telling. The anonymous Canadian couple had called it The Yacht Game, because they played it with friends aboard their yacht.

The Victorian race game Ludo, sold under that name from 1896, takes its title from a Latin word meaning what?

"I play" is the literal meaning of the Latin ludo. Alfred Coller marketed the game under that name in England in 1896.

In backgammon, what name is given to a single checker left alone on a point, where an opponent can hit it?

A blot that is hit gets lifted onto the bar, the strip that divides the two sides of the board, and must work its way back into play from there.

In Clue, a secret passage from the Kitchen leads diagonally across the board to which corner room?

The Study sits in the corner diagonally opposite the Kitchen, and each of the four corner rooms has a secret passage to the far corner, a shortcut that needs no dice roll.

Which German maker of games and jigsaw puzzles has used a blue triangle trademark since 1900?

Ravensburger is named after Ravensburg, the Upper Swabian town where Otto Robert Maier founded it in 1883. It only began producing jigsaw puzzles in 1964.