Introduction to Games You Can Play

A Game means any amusements or sport, any contest or play poker . Thus, games cover a wide range of activities. But in this website Encyclopedia of Games, I have selected the largest number of games that all can play, regardless of age or sex. Many of these can be traced back to the earliest times of man. In fact, most of our gaming implements can be traced back to man’s early practice of divination by arrows and sticks. Actually, the divinatory throwing of sticks is the casting of the lots of biblical mention, and many ancient writers refer to the bundles of sacred tamarisks twigs used by the magi of Chaldea and Babylonia, the divining rods of Assyria, and the similar baresma of the Parsis of India.
The game of Jackstraws can be traced back to this divination by throwing sticks. In other cultures the divining sticks were shorter and thicker and bore a greater resemblance to dice. Anthropologists describe their use among the African tribes of Mashonaland. “They are common among all the Abantu races and closely bound up with their occult belief in witchcraft … On the evening of the new moon the village witch-doctor will go around, tossing each man a set of dollasses in the air, and by the way they turn up he will divine the fortune of the individual for the month to come.” Missionaries who notes similar customs among the Zambesi referred to the diviner as a dice doctor. He also functioned as a detective since another use for his dice was that of discovering thieves. Gradually these primitive fortune-telling devices began to be used as fortune-gaming devices. The mystical significance of the numbers was lost, and the throw determined winning scores and decided the outcome of wagers. The liturgical rites became games.
As the arrow used in divination began to be used in gambling, three general types of games evolved guessing games, games of chance, and games of skill. In the guessing games, the arrow shaft became an ornamented gambling stick marked to denote rank which, in Korea, evolved into a deck of slim strips of oiled paper cards whose backs still bore an arrow-feather design that indicated their origin. Later Chinese cards of the same shape, called stick cards, bear figures whose resemblance to those on our present court cards is remarkable. The World’s oldest known playing card found in Chinese Turkestan is of this type and is dated at the eleventh century. They were introduced into Europe from China in the thirteenth century and may be traced to the bundle of engraved or painted arrow-derived slips used in divination.

In many of the early online play poker games such as the Korean Nyout, the Egyptian Tab, and the ancient Pachisi (Parcheesi) of India, the throw of the dice controlled the moves of counters upon a marked playing surface as in the of today. Later, when the dice and the element of chance were omitted, the game of pure skill developed and the counters became the men of Checkers, chess, the Chinese Wei-kei, and the Japanese Go. Sophocles reported that dice were invented by one Palamedes, a Greek, who thought the game to the G.I. Joes at the siege of Troy three thousand years ago, and Herodotus went to press with a claim that the galloping ivories were invented by the Lydians as a means of diverting themselves from a great famine in the days of King Atys. Both dates are several thousand years shy of the mark. Dice were old before Troy was founded and before the Lydians had a king.
Man’s very earliest written records not only mention dice and dice games, but crooked dice as well. Dice of one sort or another have been found in the tomns of ancient Egypt and the orient and prehistoric graves of both North and South America. Thus, many of the games and gaming implements have been with us for centuries. But never has there been such a complete collection of the world’s greatest games that you can play as there is in this encyclopedia. There are hundreds of games played with dice, boards counters, numbers, words, and cards. All the games described in this book are divided into three categories: games of chance, games of skill, and games which combine both chance and skill.

Poker Games: Game of chance

Games of chance are those in which there is no element of skill. They are called “mechanical games.” These include dozens of banking games. They include most dice games (Craps, chuck-a-Luck, High Dice, Hazard, Scarney Put and Take, etc.). They include casino games (Roulette, bingo, Keno, etc.) and dozens of card games (roulette, bingo, Keno, etc.) and dozens of card games (Baccarat, chemin de Fer Las Vegas Style, Faro, banker and Broker, etc.). Games of skill are those in which the element of chance is completely or nearly nonexistent, such as Chess, Teeko, checkers, Go, Scarney Solitaire, etc. Let’s start with the wide world of cards.