Simple hunks of wood like the one on the opposite page were the video games of the nineteenth century. In homes and general stores and taverns, homemade wooden game boards were indispensable implements for an evening’s recreation. They were also, almost by accident, beautiful—commonplace objects rendered extraordinary through the decoration of anonymous craftsmen. Today they are recognized as highly collectible examples of folk art.

Board games are among our oldest diversions. Ancient racing games that scholars believe to be the precursors of backgammon have been found in Sumerian burial mounds and Egyptian tombs and dated as early as 3000 B.C. There is a reference to checkers in Chaucer, European immigrants settling in America and Canada brought board games with them from the Old World, and some eighteenth-century gaming tables (usually for chess or backgammon) exist today. The American craft of the game board reached its peak, however, in the nineteenth century. One of the earliest known examples is a checkerboard manufactured in 1824, now in the hands of a private collector. By the 1850s the homemade game board was well established as a simple, cheap alternative to the lithographed boards manufactured by Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley in the same period. Sign painters, carriage makers, and, above all, talented amateurs produced their own game boards for use by family and friends. Because it was overwhelmingly an anonymous craft, there are few records, and there is little in the way of formal scholarship. But much can be deduced about the makers and their times from the boards themselves.

There are few game boards known to have come from warm climates. Most can be traced, through hints in design or construction, to Northern states. Pennsylvania Dutch designs (such as hexes) suggest Pennsylvania; Germanic motifs (such as tulips) suggest Pennsylvania or Ohio. A unique game like A Trip around the World, which features a marine motif, including an unlucky whaler being taken on a Nantucket sleigh ride, clearly indicates that it came from the New England coast. (Its construction provides another clue: The joints of the end boards are mitered together tongue and groove, possibly to prevent warping.) All this suggests that homemade gaming was in large part a diversion for long Northern winters.

Certain common pictorial elements, like the sun, moon, and stars seen in the checkerboard shown here, were part of the standard decorative vocabulary of the time and can also be found on quilts, fabrics, and painted furniture. This serves to place game boards squarely in the late-nineteenth-century tradition of decorative objects that were made first of all to be used around the home. Not that the makers were blind to their visual appeal. Some game boards still have hooks of brass or iron attached; when not in use, they were hung as wall decorations.

There are many more checkerboards surviving than