In a New Yorker profile of Milton Bradley and his Game of Life Jill Lepore says Life is in “a class of board games [called] ‘spiral race games.’”
“The oldest spiral race game,” she says in a parenthetical, “may be the Hyena Game, played by Arabs in Sudan, in a groove traced in the sand with a stick and involving a race between pebbles representing the players’ mothers, who leave their village and head to a well at the spiral’s center, where they must wash their clothes and return home before a hyena catches them.”
source: New Yorker, May 21, 2007
2 comments:
And no one has made a commercial version of that yet? It's got violent death in it! Board games never have enough violent death in them.
(word ID for this post is "fugger")
Maybe it can be Americanized by switching out the hyena for a ... uh ... serial killer?
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