By Céline Zaepffel
Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum for the year 2022-2023

As a researcher in children’s media and culture, I have often wondered what my childhood would have been like if I had been born in a different time. Would I have received an education, and of what kind? What would I have done in my spare time, and what games would I have played?

This last question can be partially answered by observing the more than 400 board games of the Rijksmuseum’s collection. As a Johan Huizinga Fellow for the year 2022-2023, I devoted nine months of my research to these games. Let’s take a closer look at my research corpus and discover what games you might have enjoyed as a child in the nineteenth century.

A product of mass-consumption

The games I am investigating were all published in popular prints (centsprenten in Dutch). Popular prints were low-priced, mass-produced pieces of paper with one side printed and illustrated with often simple pictures. They contained not only games, but also popular stories, maps, depictions of historical events, or religious images, among other things. Board games, like other forms of popular prints, were produced on low-quality paper. The aim was to reach as many people as possible, which means that popular prints were seen at any home, regardless of one’s social background.

If you had been born at the beginning of the 19^th century, the first board games you would have played would have actually been your parents’ ones. They all looked quite similar because the same patterns were often reused, so that production and distribution costs were kept to a minimum. Since the games did not come with dice, tokens, or counters, you had to provide your own; and maybe sometimes even a few beans from the kitchen served as counters or tokens. The rules were often written on the paper itself. More rarely, they were printed in a booklet or on a separate sheet of paper which you would have probably lost in a heartbeat.

The Rijksmuseum’s collections reveal that two types of games were particularly popular: Dice Games and Goose Games. Both can be found in advertisements published in nineteenth century’s newspapers, and in the collections of other museums, such as the Atlas van Stolk in Rotterdam or the Musée de l’Image in Épinal (France). All dice games were based on chance and gambling. The most popular ones were, without a doubt, Owl’s Games, Harlequin’s Games, and their derivatives. Let’s see how they work.

For adventurous players: Dice and Gambling Games

Harlequin’s Games (fig. 2) were very simple: after agreeing on a starting bet, two or more players take turns rolling two dice. When the result of the dice corresponds to an empty square on the board, the players must place a coin on the corresponding square, and the turn passes to the next player. When the dice show a square number that contains a coin already, the player retrieves the coin and rolls the dice again, until he/she has to place a coin on an empty square. If the total of the dice is 7, the player places a coin in Harlequin’s bag, from which the bets are irrecoverable until the end of the game. When a player has no more coins, he/she is eliminated; the last player left in the game gets all the coins on the board and in Harlequin’s bag.

The Owl’s Game (fig. 3) follows a more complex system. Two or more players agree on a starting bet, and then take turns throwing 3 dice. With each throw, they have to check on the board for the combination of the dice, to which a letter and a number are associated. If the letter is a B, the player must pay (betalen in Dutch) the number of coins that is associated with the letter; the money is left in the central area of the board (representing an Owl). If the letter is a T, the player collects (trekken in Dutch) the corresponding amount of coins from the Owl. If all three dice show similar numbers, the player gets half of the coins available in the centre. When the three dice show a 6, the player gets all the coins from the Owl. When the combination of the dice is associated with the word “NIET” on the board, nothing happens and the turn passes to the next player.

As we can notice, both games are money games, which means they entered households primarily for the entertainment of adults. However, from the 1830’s onwards, playing became a family activity. Printers started to see children as a new audience, to whom new, short-lived items could be marketed. No major changes were required: the rules sometimes simply suggested replacing the initial bet with tokens or candies. Thus Owl’s and Harlequin’s Games began to be advertised in newspapers as suitable for children, especially before Sinterklaas festivities, a tradition that also became popular at that time in the Netherlands.

For families and children: Goose Games

Printers gradually increased their efforts towards this new audience, especially when producing Goose Games. For example the game in figure 4, Het nieuw vermakelijk Kinder-Ganzenspel, voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd, targets young people in its title (that translates as The new entertaining Children’s Game of Goose, for the Dutch Youth), and in its depiction of teenagers in the centre and young children in the lower left corner. This game followed the traditional rules of Goose Games: two or more players took turns rolling two dice, according to which they moved their counter along a spiral track; the first player to reach square 63 won the game.

This kind of game became so popular at the time, that printers quickly worked on new variations. To do so, they did not come out with new rules. They simply produced games that replicated the mechanics of Goose Games but got rid of any traditional depictions of a goose. Instead, they put forward completely different themes that sought to be as eye-catching as possible.

Goose Games adapted for children: a growing market

As a child of the 19^th century, you might have seen Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (which was most likely your favourite novel) become the subject of such a themed game of goose. If you were not so much of a reader, you would have probably picked up instead a game depicting an activity you loved, such as skating (fig. 5). And as the world changed around you, you could witness this through your games that depicted either trains (fig.6), trams, steam boats, gas-lightening, or even world-fairs.

You might even have played a game based on an international conflict of your time, as in the case of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), that was already turned into a game the very year the conflict ended (fig. 7).

These examples show that, like today’s children, playing would not only have entertained you in the 19^th century. First, you could have learnt a few things from games depicting maps, or historical events. In times of intense political change, educational tools were often used to spread ideologies. This is also the case for games, as depictions of conflicts could unconsciously fuel your attraction to military involvement. Without necessarily going that far, they would certainly influence your worldview, as many of these games encouraged consumption by promoting modern behaviours, such as traveling, making time for hobbies, or begging your parents to buy that new brand of yoghurt that is mentioned in your favourite game. Therefore, board games of the nineteenth century were both products and facilitators of mass consumption.

In conclusion, these little-studied games are undoubtedly witnesses of the past. They do, in fact, embody the fashion, tastes, anxieties, and hopes of that time, and hence have much to tell us about the society in which they were imagined and developed…

If you have any questions regarding these games or my research in general, please reach me at c.zaepffel@rijksmuseum.nl or celine.zaepffel.uni@gmail.com.