'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.