History of the games

Northern India, by the 6th century

Nobody invented chess. It arrived by degrees, across a thousand years and three continents, and the version played today is younger than the printing press.

1. c. 600

   Chaturanga is played in northern India — the four arms of an army, infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, on sixty-four squares. There is no inventor to name. The story of a sage who asks to be paid in grain, doubled on each square, is a legend attached to the game long afterwards.

2. c. 650

   Carried into Persia as chatrang, then across the Islamic world as shatranj. Two of its words are still in English: shah for the king under attack, and shah mat — the king is helpless — for checkmate.

3. c. 1000

   Established in Europe by way of Muslim Spain and the Mediterranean. The queen is still the ferz, an adviser that shuffles one square diagonally, and games take a very long time.

4. 1475

   In Valencia the queen and the bishop are given their modern range. It is the largest rule change chess has ever had — it made the opening sharp and the game fast — and the earliest surviving record of it is a poem, Scachs d'amor. Players elsewhere called the new version mad queen chess.

5. 1749

   Philidor publishes L'analyze des échecs and argues that the pawns are the soul of chess. It is the first real positional theory, and it is written by a man better known in his lifetime as a composer of comic opera.

6. 1851

   London holds the first international tournament.

7. 1886

   Wilhelm Steinitz beats Johannes Zukertort for the first official world championship.

8. 1924

   FIDE is founded in Paris.

9. 1997

   Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov 3½–2½: the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a machine at standard time controls.

• Longest game

  269 moves

  Ivan Nikolić against Goran Arsović, Belgrade 1989. It ran past twenty hours and was drawn.

• Fastest checkmate

  2 moves

  Fool's Mate — 1.f3 e5 2.g4 Qh4#. It only happens if White cooperates.

• Longest title match

  48 games

  Karpov against Kasparov, 1984–85. Called off after five months with no result and both players spent.

• Possible games

  ~10¹²⁰

  The Shannon number, an estimate of the game tree. There are perhaps 10⁸⁰ atoms in the observable universe.

The ancient Mediterranean; the modern game, France c. 1100

Checkers is older than chess and, unlike chess, it is finished. In 2007 a computer proved the game out to its last position.

1. Antiquity

   Boards for alquerque — a game of capturing by jumping — are cut into stone across the Mediterranean and the Near East, including roof slabs at the temple of Kurna in Egypt. Those are often dated to around 1400 BCE, though the dating is disputed. The game is certainly very old.

2. c. 1100

   In southern France, alquerque's pieces move onto a chessboard. The promoted piece takes its name from the chess queen — fierge — which is why the French still call the game jeu de dames and the Germans Dame.

3. c. 1535

   France makes capturing compulsory. That version, jeu forcé, becomes the modern game; the older one, where you could decline a capture, survives for a while as le plaisant.

4. 1952

   Arthur Samuel starts a checkers program at IBM that improves by playing against itself. He later coins a phrase for what it is doing: machine learning.

5. 1994

   Chinook, from the University of Alberta, becomes the first program to win a world championship in any game against humans. Its rival Marion Tinsley withdrew from the match ill; he died the following year.

6. 2007

   Chinook's team announces that checkers is solved. Played perfectly by both sides, the game is a draw. The proof took eighteen years.

• Solved

  A draw

  Perfect play from both sides ends level. Checkers is the largest game ever solved outright.

• Positions accounted for

  5 × 10²⁰

  What the proof had to cover. Chess is thought to have something nearer 10⁴⁴.

• Tinsley's career losses

  7 games

  In forty-five years of competitive play. Two of the seven were to Chinook.

• Two games, one name

  64 or 100 squares

  English draughts uses sixty-four squares and men that move only forwards. International draughts uses a hundred, and kings that fly the length of a diagonal.

Mesopotamia and Rome; the modern name, England c. 1650

The board has barely changed in two thousand years. The thing that made backgammon a modern game is a hundred years old and fits in your palm.

1. c. 2600 BCE

   The Royal Game of Ur is played in Mesopotamia — a race decided by dice, on boards recovered from the graves at Ur. Its rules survive because a Babylonian scribe wrote them on a tablet more than two thousand years later.

2. 1st century

   Romans play tabula on a board of twenty-four points that a modern player would recognise at a glance. The emperor Claudius is said to have written a book on it and had a board fitted to his carriage.

3. c. 1650

   The name backgammon appears in English.

4. 1920s

   Someone in a New York club invents the doubling cube: before your roll you may offer to double the stakes, and your opponent must take it or concede. Nobody knows who. It is the most important change in the game's history — it turned a race into a running argument about who is actually winning.

5. 1979

   Hans Berliner's program BKG 9.8 beats world champion Luigi Villa in Monte Carlo — the first time a computer beat a reigning world champion at any board game. Berliner said afterwards that the dice had been kind to it.

6. 1992

   TD-Gammon, written by Gerald Tesauro at IBM, teaches itself by playing itself a million times over. It reaches world-class strength, and then does something rarer: it changes how the best humans play, because it kept preferring opening moves the books had rejected.

• The doubling cube

  1920s

  Invented in New York. The inventor's name was never recorded.

• Distinct rolls

  21, not 36

  Two dice land thirty-six ways but only twenty-one of them are different turns, since 5-3 and 3-5 are the same. Doubles come up half as often as the other rolls.

• The opening throw

  Never a double

  Each player rolls a single die to decide who begins, and a tie is thrown again — so the first move of a game is always two different numbers.

• Checkers per side

  15

  Each running a track of twenty-four points in opposite directions, which is why a blot left behind you is safe and one in front of you is not.

China, by the 13th century; Europe, early 1700s

Dominoes came out of China, and somewhere on the way to Europe they gained the blanks that make the modern game.

1. c. 1270s

   The earliest clear written record of dominoes is in Zhou Mi's Former Events in Wulin, which describes tiles for sale in the markets of the Song capital.

2. Chinese sets

   Chinese dominoes are the twenty-one throws of two dice made solid. There are no blanks, and eleven of the tiles are duplicated, which gives a set of thirty-two.

3. Early 1700s

   Dominoes appear in Italy, in Venice and Naples. By now they have blanks — a whole extra rank that China's sets never had — and a double-six set has grown to twenty-eight tiles.

4. The name

   Probably from the domino, a black hooded cloak lined with white worn at Venetian carnival. The same contrast as the tiles.

5. 1998–2009

   Domino Day turns toppling into a televised spectacle in the Netherlands, and the record climbs year after year.

• A double-six set

  28 tiles

  Every pairing of nought through six, counted once. The blank-blank is a tile like any other.

• Bigger sets

  55 and 91

  Double-nine has fifty-five tiles and double-twelve has ninety-one. A double-n set always has (n+1)(n+2)/2.

• Toppling record

  4,491,863

  Tiles felled at Domino Day in the Netherlands, 2009.

• What Europe added

  The blanks

  Chinese tiles cover only what two dice can show. Adding a blank rank is what makes a European set larger and the games different.