The ornament of life

It can be assumed that the appearance of board games in the ancient times was a reaction to a complication of social structure, when one life paradigm was replaced with a new one. For instance, the forest gathering was displaced by agriculture; it taught humans that there could be orthogonal shapes (agriculture fields), regular, and straight/parallel lines (the invention of the plow). Life became more complicated, full of unpredictable factors and correlation and thus it was reflected in games with complex rules. Moreover, mankind at that period of time began to use abstraction, for instance, ornaments appeared. This illustrated not just a specific object, for example, a river, but its abstract and simplified representation: its zigzag shape. This means more than a graphic image because a little story was embedded: since the river flows in a zigzag manner, it has many turns.

Abstraction, simplification, and toleration are the foundation of any board game because all the...