Hi,
Our Anthropologist Walter would be the best person to answer this question, but I'll have a stab at it while he's on holidays...
The first known board games are Mehen (c. 3100 BC) and Senet (c. 3000 BC) from Ancient Egypt, both of which almost certainly involved moving pieces according to dice/stick throws.
The first known pure strategy game (if that's what you mean by "abstract") could well be Go, which has evidence dating back to 548 BC. There is an earlier game Pente Grammai from Ancient Greece c. 600 BC, but its rules are not known for certain.
This is exactly the sort of question that we hope to shed some light on in this project. Now that Ludii is largely ready, the next step is to complete our data gathering to get as much evidence as we can for ancient and early games, then look for correlations within the data in order to make plausible reconstructions and try to chart their development.
Regards,
Cameron
Our Anthropologist Walter would be the best person to answer this question, but I'll have a stab at it while he's on holidays...
The first known board games are Mehen (c. 3100 BC) and Senet (c. 3000 BC) from Ancient Egypt, both of which almost certainly involved moving pieces according to dice/stick throws.
The first known pure strategy game (if that's what you mean by "abstract") could well be Go, which has evidence dating back to 548 BC. There is an earlier game Pente Grammai from Ancient Greece c. 600 BC, but its rules are not known for certain.
This is exactly the sort of question that we hope to shed some light on in this project. Now that Ludii is largely ready, the next step is to complete our data gathering to get as much evidence as we can for ancient and early games, then look for correlations within the data in order to make plausible reconstructions and try to chart their development.
Regards,
Cameron