Benjamin Woolley is back in his second series of 'Games Britannia'.
This time, Woolley talks about the social and political impacts board games have made in Britain, specifically with the more known and played games such as 'Monopoly', 'Cluedo' and 'Scrabble'. These games were the most popular in Britain and remain so today.
This episode of the series was good, but not as good as the last epsiode 'Dicing with Destiny'. This was because on 'Dicing with Destiny' there were so many new and different games that I've never heard of before being played after so long. However, on 'Monopolies and Mergers' the main focus is around board games we know very well, but also on their predecessors.
I think the most intriguing (and somewhat amusing) part of the video was when Woolley went to play in a competition of Monopoly where the prize is to go to Las Vegas to play in the Monopoly competition there. I did find this amusing how a board game which can be played by anyone has turned into a big event. The best part was Woolley even managed to win on one of the tables against some members who were taking part in the competition.
I think Monopoly is more down to being lucky with your rolls and landing on the right squares more than the skill of buying the right properties/housing your properties which Woolley showed in the Monopoly tournament, after all, during his game it would have taken just one roll onto an opponents square to make you lose the game.
Thursday 11 December 2014
'Games Britannia: Dicing with Destiny PT 1' - My thoughts
Games Britannia (presented by Benjamin Woolley) is a documentary on very old board games which date back to as old as the 1st century of Britain. He shows that the board games they made during their times were very important to most people, either due to their fun nature, their significance in religion, or the way some games can be gambled on to make lots of money.
It's quite surprising watching this program and see how people in the Medieval era to the Victorian era would gamble so much that laws were actually passed to ban die as they believed they were evil and gambling was evil. Yet despite this law passing people would still play these games either in secrecy or by using an alternate type of die such as a spinner (which was acceptable, yet its mechanic is the same as a die).
Another surprise was the amount of games that had some religious meaning behind the game, usually embedded into the game on the squares themselves. An example being the original game before snakes and ladders, where the players were looking to try and find enlightenment whilst travelling around the board in the religion Hinduism. From this I can see that most people had a very strong faith towards their religion in the past to not only pray for religion, but also play for religion.
Unfortunately I am unable to provide a link to the program.
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