Board Games of Medieval Europe

To picture the medieval gaming table is to set aside the modern board with its glossy box and printed rules. In the Middle Ages, a board was often a thing of necessity and invention: a pattern scratched into a cloister bench, a grid cut into the back of a cathedral choir stall, lines incised on a roof tile by a bored laborer. The games themselves fell into three broad families, and together they tell us a good deal about how Europe between roughly 500 and 1500 amused itself.

Mills, hunts, and tables

The first family is the mill games, of which the best known is Nine Men’s Morris. Already ancient by the medieval period (boards survive from Roman contexts and the game’s roots reach back further still), Morris was played all across the Middle Ages in Italy, France, and England before largely falling out of fashion by around 1600. Players placed and then slid pieces to form a line of three, a “mill,” capturing an opponent’s man with each completed row. It needed nothing but two sets of pebbles and a few scratched lines, which is why archaeologists find Morris boards carved everywhere from monastery cloisters to the decks of sunken ships.

The second family is the hunt games, asymmetrical contests in which unequal forces faced off. The Norse and Anglo-Saxon world played the tafl games, hnefatafl most famously, on grids as large as eleven by eleven squares. Here a king and his defenders, starting at the center, tried to escape to the edges while a larger attacking force closed in. The Old Norse vocabulary preserved a whole taxonomy of board play: skák-tafl for chess, kvátru-tafl for tables, hala-tafl for fox-and-geese, and hræ-tafl for the morris games. Several excavated boards carry hnefatafl on one face and Nine Men’s Morris on the other: two games on one piece of wood.

The third family is the tables games, the medieval ancestors of backgammon, played on the familiar twelve-point race track with dice. These were the gambler’s games, and the dice that drove them drew the disapproval of moralists and the occasional royal prohibition.

The arrival of chess

Over this older landscape came chess, carried west from India through the Islamic world and into Christian Europe by roughly the tenth century. It arrived as a courtly accomplishment, and the medieval imagination quickly bent it to allegory: the pieces became estates of society, the vizier became a queen, the war elephant a bishop. By the late Middle Ages chess had been thoroughly Europeanized, and the queen had acquired her sweeping modern powers in a burst of rule changes around 1500.

What unites these games is how little separated the sacred from the idle. The same hands that carved a Morris grid into a church step might, an hour later, sit through Mass above it. Gaming pieces turn up in graves, in monastery refuse heaps, and in the holds of merchant ships. They are the residue of long winters, longer voyages, and the human need to pass the time with a worthy opponent.

Holding the board again

Much of medieval play has reached us not through written rules but through the boards themselves, worn smooth by centuries of fingers. To run a thumb along an incised mill pattern is to touch a habit older than the cathedrals it was scratched into.

If you would like to bring one of these games back to your own table, explore our museum-grade reconstruction of Nine Men’s Morris and play the same lines a medieval mason once scratched into stone.