The Cultural Legacy of the Royal Game of the Goose

Abstract

The Game of the Goose is one of the oldest printed board games, dating back 400 years. It has spawned thousands of derivatives: simple race games, played with dice, on themes that mirror much of human activity. Its legacy can be traced in games of education, advertising and polemic, as well as in those of amusement and gambling - and games on new themes are still being developed. This book, by the leading international collector of the genre, is devoted to showing why the Game of the Goose is special and why it can lay claim to being the most influential of any printed game in the cultural history of Europe. Detailed study of the games reveals their historical provenance and - reversing the process - gives unusual insights into the cultures which produced them. They therefore provide rich sources for the cultural historian. This book is beautifully illustrated with more than 90 illustrations, many in color, which are integrated throughout the text.

The Gambling Permeation? Cultural, Social and Economic Intersections Between Games and Gambling

“…The Royal Game of Goose, as a classic race game, has origins stretching back to the fifteenth century. Seville (2016) has traced these origins and argued that the game was a "symbolic representation of spiritual progress of the human soul, a representation in which the geese denote favourable spiritual guidance while the hazards represent earthly temptations and pitfalls along the way". This tendency for games as instruction accelerated in the nineteenth century.…”