Games with Put & Take

[Jonas Richter]

Hi everyone,

spinning off of the recent discussion about owl games I'm curious about
the history of the basic "put & take" element, that is: a central pot/
bank, and some mechanic (usually a randomizer) leading to various
outcomes of putting something into the pot, or taking something out. A
classic example would be the dreidel, which according to online sources
came up in 16th century, and teetotums marked not with pips or numbers,
but with put and take commands (put 1, take 2 etc.).

Pela il Chiu is of course another example, the Gioco della Mea would be
another.

A fascinating 14-sided die dated to the second half of the 15th century
carries German put & take commands: "Nimbs gar", "nimbs halb" etc. The
die is described in Zangs/Holländer (eds.): Mit Glück und Verstand.
Aachen 1994, p. 129.

What other examples do you know of? Is this an early modern tradition
from Europe, or is there evidence from antiquity and/or other parts of
the world?

And can you recommend any literature on the subject?

Jonas

[ofatihparlak]

Hi Jonas,

There are numerous games with Tira/Paga (take-pa) mechanism beginning from the early modern period until today. To me it was invented in the late middle ages and has subtle connections with printed board games. It is one of the few mechanisms frequently used in early modern printed games (the other two are biribissi and Goose). Almost all of Mitelli's games are designed with this mechanism (see two of my favorites: Il Gioco del Aquila and Il Gioco della Verità). The mechanism is very suitable for typical chance-based printed board games and designers must have felt comfortable using it for their purposes because it allowed them to create games with many different themes. To me one of the main characteristics of early modern board games is their being thematic and played on concrete/representational game-space, while games from earlier ages are played on abstract surfaces. Later in the 18th century, Tira/Paga was incorporated into Goose games, too, which seems to have increased the possibility of new themes even more (see La Géographie Universelle). In other words, Tira/Paga accommodates countless themes (e.g love, courtship, vices and virtues, history, geography... you name it), which quality was used effectively for didactic purposes as well as propaganda in later periods. 

I briefly wrote about tira/paga in my thesis. I would love to know more about its history before the early modern period.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Fatih. 

Links: 

http://www.giochidelloca.it/scheda.php?id=746

http://www.giochidelloca.it/scheda.php?id=742

http://www.giochidelloca.it/scheda.php?id=1046

[Malcolm J Watkins]

Dear Friends,

There is, of course, the Long Lawrence dice which is certainly 17th-century (Willughby's Book of Games), and serves the same function of put and take. I would incline to even older origins, personally.

Malcolm

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "bgs4ever" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bgs4ever+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bgs4ever/40202218-adb7-4c94-a41e-062b77089643n%40googlegroups.com.