During the reign of Atys of Lydia there was a great famine throughout that land. To distract themselves from their hunger, the Lydians invented dice, bloody knuckles, mumbly peg, ball games, and many other games we enjoy even today. One day they'd play games, and the next day they would procure food. They went on in this way for 18 years. The moral here is that a good time is often needed in the worst of times. That the best time for a laugh may be in those times when the Gods shit fury on you, your kith & kin.
an interesting thought, though rather then blaming gods, one could analyze situations and seek to avoid causing less pleasant ones.
I heard that this one game called "chess" was invented back in like... historic times. Apparently people still play it!
there was a game people today call sennit, or something like that, it looks a little bit like one legged parcheezy, and just as a wild guess, which supposedly no one knows, was probably played in much the same way: roll a die, advance so many squares, possibly take an opponents piece like in chess or checkers, and whoever gets to the head of the table furst wins. there are a bunch of other interesting ancient gaming artifacts, that of course, unfortunately came with no instruction book, or at least one that wasn't written on a clay tablet in linear b, and didn't get seperated and lost from the gaming pieces themselves. i do find them fascinating and the idea of making games today based on their form factors, even without knowing how they actually were played.
oh i remember there is a game called owaru, or something like that, that is still played today and was popular for a while some time, i think it was in the 70s or 80s, but evidence of it having been played goes back long before chess. i don't remember exactly how its played but all you need is a bunch of small somethings you can hold several of in your hand, i think acorns would be about the right size, or pupkin seeds, or something like that, and i think it was five or six, not more then nine, bowls, or depressions scooped in the ground. multiple players take turns putting their seeds/counters into everyone else's bowls. first person empty at the end of the turn before their's wins. something like that. or it could be played for full instead of empty. anyway the idea was really simple played socially. came from somewhere in africa. oh and i think for it to work, each player starts with the same number of counters as each other which has to be one (or more) less then the number of bowls.
might have been the root of that. i'm probably wrong about this, i don't remember for sure, but i thought backgammon involved cards or dice or something. this is way simpler. it doesn't require anything other then just seeds or marbles or something like that, and bowls or hollow places. one 'bowl' for each player, and an equal number of counters that is less then the number of bowls for each. the bowls can be any kind of hollow dish shaped depressions in the ground or in a piece of wood or actual soup bowls, just anything, and the counters can be really just about anything that the starting number of them can be held in one hand, and there's enough of identical ones, for everyone to start with that many of them. one or more less then the number of bowls/players if you wanted to make a gamboling game out of it, as i imagine a lot of ancient players did, you could have a betting pool on who was going to win or how many beans who would have when someone did, or i suppose you could use actual coins for the counters themselves. something this simple there's endless ways that you could. you could even, when someones bowl is completely empty on the turn before theirs, call that the end of the round, and the number of beans in everyone else's bowl, whoever had the most or least or something, would take the pot for that round, if there were like an anti for each turn or something. but at any rate, none of those complexities are really required.
Legend has it that when the primitive tribes in the mountains of southern China saw civilization rapidly spreading out over the vast plains below, they immediately recognized that, not only did their new neighbors have a million kids, but they were all organized along the same lines as any flock of chickens that they raised! It was the only way they could maintain order in their vast numbers and, to make matters worse, they were the equivalent of free range chickens, who had few natural boundaries or defenses out on the open plains. They would treat each other like chickens as well, herding one another like so many flightless birds, surrounding their enemies and, finally, picking them off one at a time, just like shooting fish in a barrel. When droughts caused famine among the Mongols to the north, they too would blanket the vast plains of mainland China on their sturdy horses, like a raging stampede, then proceed to herd and slaughter the Chinese peasants, as if they were merely herding their cattle back home. The peasants were so desperately exposed to an army of any size, that the Chinese eventually constructed enough walls to circumnavigate the globe 26 times, but all in vain. Necessity is the mother of invention, and they invented steel, gunpowder, and other advanced weapons centuries before the rest of the world, but nothing could stem the tide of the relentless power struggle that had overwhelmed the seven feuding kingdoms for control of mainland China. During the infamous “Warring States Period” this went on for four hundred long years, and a grim new arms race emerged, as generation after generation of peasants throughout China, were forced to episodically starve themselves, in order to feed more babies, so they could be the first to surround their enemies. Female infants were sometimes abandoned on the side of the road, because they could not fight, were not as strong in the fields, and could not even be given away for free, much less sold into slavery. Not only did other people ruthlessly exploit the peasants at every opportunity, but they were now forced to ruthlessly exploit their own children and themselves, as if they were nothing more than cattle. And, when their tribal brothers and sisters up in the mountains saw the horror of their plight, they took pity on them, and sent them their best jokes and poetry knowing that, sometimes, all the humble beauty and humor that life has to offer, can be the best medicine, and they had some of the most powerful medicine on the planet.
