OLDEST BOARD GAME IN AMERICA TEACHES 19TH CENTURY GEOGRAPHY

With over 150,000 board games available worldwide and the United States leading the way in this market, one may wonder where it all began. Some may have guessed the traditional games, such as Jenga, Scrabble, and Monopoly. But long before these, the first board game in America was created.

46 years after America attained independence, Frederick and Roe Lockwood published Travelers' Tour Through the United States for the first time in 1822. This two-to-four-player geography-focused game is based on a map of the United States at the time.

It includes twenty-four states, from the Atlantic coast to the newer Southern states like Arkansas and Missouri. Players can relocate to any of the 139 numbered cities and towns on the map.

Players take turns spinning a teetotum, an alternative to dice because dice were associated with gambling, starting at Washington and racing to be the first to reach New Orleans. The educational board game is true to its label as an "instructive pastime," as it requires players to name the city to advance and, in a more challenging version, to guess the population of the urban area.

Frederick and Roe Lockwood, the two brothers who printed the game and were cartographers, first worked as foreign language publishers before branching out to provide a different kind of kid-friendly learning experience. Although the exact number of copies printed is unknown, the fact that so few of them survive suggests that not many were probably sold.

The game took the title of the oldest known American board game—The Mansion of Happiness—when it was first found in 1991 by the American Antiquarian Society. The oldest playable board game in the world is over 4,000 years old, but Travelers' Tour Through the United States is over two centuries older. One of the oldest board games known to exist is the Royal Game of Ur, which has its roots in ancient Mesopotamia.

The basic idea of the board game is to race your opponent to the other side of the board by moving your pieces across it. Board games have been used historically as both pastimes and windows into the past, as shown by Travelers' Tour Through the United States and The Royal Game of Ur. In a similar vein, Monopoly will eventually serve as a means for future generations to observe how our economy runs and how we pass the time.