Traditional board games are played on wooden, cloth, or drawn boards, with pieces made of wood, stone, bone, seed, shell, or terracotta. Many are thousands of years old and are still played daily. The category includes strategy games with two opposing sides, race games where pieces move round a track, and pit-and-seed games where the player moves counters around holes in the board.
Traditional board sets are still hand-crafted — inlaid wood, carved bone, marquetry work, engraved silver — and are among the great craft objects of the world. The rules of traditional games often have local variants: the "same" game may be played slightly differently from village to village, and modernisation has often codified only one variant while others persist locally.
Explore this craft by country
Each country page describes how this tradition is practised there — its own names, materials, workshops and living makers.