How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 63

Figure 14. Possible nyout routes.
Some of the earliest race games were the aforementioned circle-and-
cross games. One of these is a Korean game called nyout (or yut nori),
and it could date as far back as 50 BCE. 1 Nyout is played on a square or
circular board with two crosses going through the middle ( Figure 14 ) .
Players roll dice (actually, they didn't have dice at that time and instead
used marked sticks that would be thrown to get random results) to move
along the track, and the first person to return to the starting tile wins the
game. Players who land on the center tile or one of the corner tiles are
allowed to take the shortcut.
Most people today would find nyout and related games to not have
nearly enough decision making, since they are literally driven completely
by luck. The modern Sorry! has at least one decision—choosing which
piece to move—but earlier circle-and-cross games had no decisions to
make at all. For this reason I consider games like nyout to be contests,
not games.
In the race category, we also have many backgammon-style games.
One of the most famous—and also one of the oldest games on record—is
the Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares ( Fig-
ure 15 ) . Like nyout, this is a game where you simply roll dice to move
your pieces and try to get to the end of a track. Also like nyout, the player
has almost no choices to make during play. Many believe that this game
(and possibly many early games) was played for money, and there's evi-
dence that not only was the Royal Game of Ur played with an initial
starting wager, but that landing on one of the four corner points (labeled
with hexagons) forced players to increase their wagers. So while the
game itself does not involve decision making, there is the meta decision
of how much to bet. This feature would be developed and result in a new
category—gambling games—which we'll address in a moment.
It should be clear how both of these games evolved to create the still
tremendously popular backgammon, which also has a mechanism based
1 Interestingly, nyout has been useful to anthropologists: although it was created in Ko-
rea, it was later found featured in carvings and other representations in Mayan ruins,
suggesting that North America was indeed populated from northeast Asia.