Games Britannia - Dicing with Destiny

Games Britannia is a 3 part documentary presented by Benjamin Woolley. In the first episode “Dicing with Destiny”. To start with, Woolley looks back to ancient games and shows us that our human instinct to play games dates back very far. However, many of these ancient games weren’t designed to just be fun, but were made to guide or educate the players and many games had a spiritual meaning.

The first game he looked at was “The Stanway Game”, a game that was buried with an important spiritual figure which leads us to believe that the game itself likely has a strong spiritual meaning. 

However, Woolley looked at many other old games which were used for entertainment or spending time without any noticeable spiritual meaning. However, by the 14^th century gambling games had been created which can be considered the opposite of the spiritual games and games with dice and gambling were considered the devil and condemned by the church. The spiritual games then became less significant over the years as gambling games became more and more popular.

The game of goose was then released, it used a spinning top instead of dice as they were still believed to be evil and the game focused on virtues. It was aimed to teach children and educate them to do good things whilst the player was punished on the negative tiles that were considered sins.

Woolley then continues to look at games that led to popular games that we now play today such as snakes & ladders and chess.