This game you cannot play, I'm afraid -- at least, not unless you possess a time machine, and can travel to the premises of Carrington Bowles in mid-18th century London to purchase it, or you are among the handful of people lucky enough to own one of the few extant copies of the game. Lacking that, you will have to be satisfied with the image at left (a more detailed one here). It's a scan of the board as it appears in Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days, which is my primary source on the subject.
Why is A Journey Through Europe important?
It is the first designed game.
Oh, other games predate it--but they are "folk games" (to use Parlett's term). They are the products of folk tradition; they are gaming's equivalent of Gilgamesh. A Journey Through Europe is our equivalent of the Iliad; we know who wrote it. John Jefferys is our Homer.
Does it matter that "we know who wrote it?" Yes. Absolutely. Chess and Go are superb games, but they are no one's product; they are the result of interative refinement, over hundreds of years, by manifold hands. They are directly analogous to folk tales; Parlett's term is well chosen. But to become an art form, a medium must pass beyond the folk tradition, and become one in which recognizable creators can work; it must become something that people work at, and create individual products that people can recognize as the results of creative vision.
A Journey Through Europe was published in 1759; and John Jefferys, its designer, is in a real and meaningful sense, the intellectual forebear of everyone who came after: of Mr. Milton Bradley and Mr. George Parker, of H.G. Wells; of Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph, of Charles Roberts, of Gygax and Arneson, of Nolan Bushnell, of Shigeru Miyamoto, of Sid Meier and Will Wright. Add any names you wish: John Jefferys is the first person we can point to and say: "He designed this game."
From A Journey Through Europe follows--everything. Certainly everything you will discover at this site.
Mind you, it's the earliest designed game I've been able to discover, and possibly someone else will find another; and as someone who speaks only one language, it's possible I've missed someone in France, or Germany, or even ancient China, to whom we can ascribe an earlier design; and if someone can correct me, I will be delighted to learn better.
But absent that, it appears to me that A Journey Through Europe is the first drop of what today is a torrential downpour; the ur-design, the game that ultimately led to the establishment of gaming as an artform.
To give a sense of cultural context: In 18th century in Britain, many publishers printed maps, on small pieces of paper mounted on canvas backing (which could be conveniently folded), often hand-tinting them. Some publishers, Carrington Bowles among them, experimented with expanding their market by publishing games in the same fashion, often (but not always) based on maps. A Journey Through Europe is predated by a handful of publications, but those are reprints of folk games, rather than original designs. Post-1759, dozens of such games appear.
We may imagine that, given the labor entailed in hand-tinting and mounting on canvas, these earliest games remained pricey items, retailed primarily to wealthy parents of upper class children interested in a mildly educational passtime; yet this first flower of boardgaming leads directly to the rise of the British and American mass market boardgame industries of the 19th century, when cheap (by contemporary standards) color printing allowed companies like McLaughlin Brothers and the eponymous Milton Bradley Company to reach a wide market. And that industry led directly to our modern mass market boardgame industry, likewise the Eurogame industry, likewise board wargaming and tabletop roleplaying and miniatures gaming--and, along with the arcade, became one of the two main streams producing our modern digital games industry.
No doubt something would have arisen with digital technology even in the absence of John Jefferys and his seminal game; yet innovation, and precedence, is important, too. It is meet to acknowledge Mr. Jefferys as the fount of all we enjoy today.
What is A Journey Through Europe? It is not, by modern standards, a particularly astonishing game. It is a "track game" (or if you adopt Parlett's parlance, a "race game"). Each player begins with a token in -- well, it looks like Grimsby, but perhaps it's York -- and the first player to complete his journey through Europe and return to London wins. Each turn, a player spins a "teetotum" -- a common device in 18th and early 19th-century boardgames, a spindle with a polygon about it. When it comes to rest, you read the number on the side of the polygon resting on the table, and this is your "die roll," in essence. Dice would be unacceptable, since they are used in gambling, and are thus instruments of the Devil, and therefore unacceptable in any devout household; many early boardgames used teetotums as a culturally acceptable random number generator in place of dice. Today, of course, we are free of such superstitious constraints on what we may design -- after all, enlightened nations such as Canada and Australia never seek to censor games dealing with subject matter of which they disapprove, and our good friends in Bentonville, Arkansas are happy to accomodate AO-rated games on the shelves of Wal-Mart.
You advance your token as many spaces along the track as the number indicated, read the text printed there (or rather, reference the text at left on the board), and follow the instructions thereon. As examples:
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He who rests at 28 at Hanover shall by order of Ye King of Great Britain who is Elector, be conducted to No 54 at Gibraltar to visit his countrymen who keep garrison there; and
He who rests at 48 at Rome for kissing ye Pope's Toe shall be banished for his folly to No 4 in the cold island of Iceland and miss three turns.
A variant of Snakes and Ladders, then, with a mild educational benefit for the players in terms of learning the geography of Europe--as it then existed. And perhaps amusing to us today for exposing the prejudices of the time.
A Journey Through Europe is a straightforward track game, of which we have many subsequent examples; and yet, reading of it, it is hard not to feel a shiver up your spine.
This is where our journey begins. A journey that has only begun; but as we move into the future, as we work to establish games as what we believe they have the potential to become -- the most exciting and important popular art humanity has yet imagined -- let us pause to remember John Jeffreys, an otherwise anonymous ink-stained wretch skipping over the open sewers of 18th-century London, and acknowledge him as our forefather. Nay, as the first among us, the first person able to bear the proud title of Game Designer.
John Jefferys, we salute you. We only wish we could play your thing.
We aren't sure
actually, if the Illiad and Odyssey were the products of a single poet or "the result of interactive refinement, over hundreds of years, by manifold hands." See Gregory Nagy for the gradual, multi-author theory, and Geoffrey Kirk for the single author model. I find Nagy far more convincing, myself. The dispute makes me wonder if games which are considered the work of a single author now will be considered collaborative in the distant future; will the "author" of the RPG genre be mythologized, perceived as the fountainhead of all the RPG variants in existence? If any of us are here to do such work, of course.
"race games"
Murray's classic A History of Board-games Other Than Chess lists the primary types of folk games, which include race games, mancala games, hunt games, and war games.
Some of the game boards are illustrated in the book: they look quite "designed." I'd say A Journey Through Europe is the first mass-produced game.
Very interesting article.
Very interesting article.
Personal Homer
There's only one sense in which we can say, about the designer of a game that isn't worth playing even as a curiosity, that he is like Homer: we know nothing about him beyond his name. After that, the comparison starts looking a little silly.
Seriously, Greg: Homer? Really?
I like to see game designers given their due too. Homer's work and name survive to this day because people felt it worth copying, by hand, from start to finish. This work, on the other hand, survives to this day only because it was made during the age of mechanical reproduction, and thus enough copies were made that not all of them got lost over the last two and a half centuries.
You can adopt him as your personal Homer if you want, but I'd prefer someone who we know a little more about, who designed a game that's still avidly played today, and who happened to do his thing over a century before John Jeffreys: Sir John Suckling, who invented cribbage.
Granted, he didn't invent it ab nihilo: it was based on an earlier folk game called noddy. But if know cribbage, and you look at the rules for noddy (http://www.davidparlett.co.uk/histocs/noddy.html), it's abundantly clear that what Suckling did was turn a shallow game into a deep one.
I don't know that Suckling is the earliest designer we know of by name either. But he's certainly earlier than Jeffreys, and his game is lots better.
Cribbage
Thanks, Rob... Oh, sure, "Homer" is overstating the case. Journey Through Europe is a dull track game, exceptional only through its antiquity, and the Illiad and the Odyssey are still remarkable and moving -despite- their antiquity. But I'm not shy about overstating the case when making one.
As to Sir John Suckling and Cribbage -- I didn't know that. Thanks. That's interesting.