Unearthing amusements

BASED ON A TRANSLATION BY TW RHYS DAVIDS

- Vinita Sidhartha

Imagine an ideal world, where if one wanted to do research on traditional games, one would be able to go through some old texts and find the list of games that people used to play – with detailed descriptions of the board, the game pieces, the throw pieces, the rules and a little about why the game was created, its history, its cultural underpinnings.

Sadly, we don’t live in an ideal world and there is no such book available. I also think that perhaps if all of this was so freely available, we might not appreciate it as much. The thrill sometimes is in the discovery.