Parcheesi is a game that seems simple at first, but has quite a few intricate nuances that promotes smart play while using what is at the player’s disposal. It also has two very interesting histories surrounding it: the history of the game’s predecessor and the history of its commercial success in the United States.
The game of Parcheesi has its roots from Chaupur, a game played amongst the nobles of the Mogulian dynasty in sixteenth century India. A unique departure from the modern day counter part is that the game could have a life-size quality to it, with the servants of the noble being the board pieces. The game boards were exquisitely made out of cloth, and had to be quite large, since they were made to be laid out on the noble’s courtyards.
The board shape was similar to modern day Parcheesi, with four eight-by-three grid placed around the cardinal directions of a center square. However, there was a unique difference, as safe locations for pieces are spaced in fairly different locations between the versions, with chaupur placing their safe zone twenty-five spaces within each other. Another important difference is where the pieces start at the beginning of the game. In Parcheesi, pieces have a home base in the four empty corners of the board, and make their first move four spaces up from the bottom in the right column of their home “arm”. Meanwhile in its predecessor, pieces started from the square in the center and moved down the center column of their home “arm”, and move around the board counter clock-wise around the edges of the arms. Since players must finish by leading all their pieces to the center square of the board through the center column of their starting branch, pieces had to be differentiated between those leaving the home square and those returning to the home square. A final interesting note is how the game of chaupur was played with teams of two, instead of a four-man free for all, and the teams won or lost together, which adds a very interesting component of strategy to the game, since turns could be voluntarily forfeited.
While it has an interesting history in India as chaupur, Parcheesi also has plenty of intriguing phenomena around its rise in the states. It was one of three games, along with Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble, which allowed Selchow & Righter to become a financial powerhouse within the world of games merchandizing in the late 1800’s. Another interesting fact about Parcheesi is that it is one of the first games that received a patent in the United States, which occurred in 1874. The game itself sold 33,382 units in 1885, and was a consistent source of revenue for the company throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
Of course, due to the success of Parcheesi at the time, there were also similar games made by their competitors. One of the most notable ones is the Parker Brother game Sorry!, originally produced in England, and is still readily available today. The most notable difference between Parcheesi and Sorry! is the lack of dice in Sorry!, which opts to use card draws for movement instead. There’s less strategy involved in Sorry!, since tactics such as locking off portions of the board from an opposing player by placing two of their pieces side by side on the same square are unable to be performed in Sorry!.
Ultimately, Parcheesi proves to be a game with a series of fascinating histories behind its financial success and its root game.
Sometimes it must be asked just how much skill goes into a successful completion of a game, which is something that will be explored next time with the history of pinball machines.
Sources
Depaulis, Thierry & co. ed., Board Game Studies: International Journal of Board Games. Lieden
University, 1999. http://ludicum.org/publicacoes/bgsj/2.pdf#page=114
Petrik, Paula. “The House That Parcheesi Built: Selchow & Righter Company”. The Business
History Review, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 410-43. The President and Fellows of
Harvard CollegeStable, 1986. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115884
Wilkins, Sally. Sports and Games Throughout History: Sports and Games of Medieval Cultures. Greenwood Press, 2002.
No comments:
Post a Comment