(You can imagine how Puritan elders would have felt about the way the Mogul emperor Akbar played pachisi (known today by the trademark version Parcheesi). Dice were taboo as well, since the Old Testament mentioned casting lots as a way of judging God's will and rolling dice was thought to demean such a holy practice.

Cards were called the 'Devil's picture books,' and in 17th-century Salem you could be fined 2 for 'playing at' them.

Puritans were not too crazy about such frivolous pursuits as games. Games had a rough time in early America, too, but for different reasons. To make matters worse, European rulers were forever forbidding their subjects from playing cards or otherwise amusing themselves for fear that their longbow and pike-wielding skills would suffer. game manufacturers are regularly hit by lawsuits from individuals who claim to have invented whatever happens to be selling well at the time.) Leisure time itself is a fairly new concept, and while many games are very old, our ancestors didn't have a lot of time to play them, what with scratching out a meager existence and dying of the plague. (And, proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same, today's U.S. No wonder most books on the subject hedge their bets and say the origins of chess are 'lost in obscurity.' The origins of playing cards, dominoes and dice are similarly hazy. The creation of chess, for example, has been claimed by the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Scythians, Persians, Hindus, Castilians, Irish and Welsh, among others. GAMES OF OLD Games have been around about as long as there have been people to play them - and to argue about who invented them. Still, during our own deadzone - with the dark cloak of winter making outdoor activity less appealing - it's not a bad time to take a tip from Tut and explore the netherworld of board games, a world perfect for visiting when the windows are shut tight and a fire is keeping the cold at bay. Stick a copy of Trivial Pursuit in a cave for 4,000 years and you'd probably get a pile of dust. It's doubtful today's games would hold up as well as Tut's game of Senet. King Tut would be entertained for eternity. The box and its contents were a board game. When British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb in 1922, he found near this strange box tiny pieces of carved ivory and ebony and some hunks of resin shaped like pig knucklebones. Whoever picked out the objects that adorned the tomb chose to include a curious box that was covered with hieroglyphics. WHEN TUTANKHAMEN, the boy-pharaoh with the shiny gold mask, was laid to rest in his rocky tomb near the Nile, his bereft subjects tried to equip him with everything he'd need in the afterlife.

List of colonial dice gambling games