Home Home
  • Card games: One & Thirty, Bone-Ace (An ancestor to modern Blackjack, and mentioned as early as 1611.)
  • Maw was popular with the English court starting with James I
  • Cribbage and it's ancestor Noddy were being played
  • For Dice games Hazard was the longest standing popular dice game in Europe.
  • Backgammon -even folding backgammon boards are documented.
  • But also you could play chess (the style of men are in a bit of a flux at this period with many very elaborate sets and some more simple ones)
  • Nine Men's Morris was still popular
  • Fox and Geese
  • Draughts (known as Checkers in the USA).
  • The Royal Game of Goose was played for fun and for money.
  • Piquet was the favourite of Charles and Henrietta.
  • In one of Henrietta's letters to her friend in France, she asks for a game of Spillikins: they are good fun. These were commonly made from reeds but the Queen asks for them especially so I expect they could be made as elaborately - like the plastic 'ladders' and 'hammers' you can buy today.
  • Seventeenth century cricket is good fun. Use oversized Hockey sticks and shorter stumps and they, along with Quoits, are of great interest to the crowd.
  • The Earl of Newcastle, when exiled on the continent, won lots of money at 'The Butts' which is archery of course. Archery was also very popular.

A book published 1658 shows a pictures of various boys activities with the accompanying caption: "Boys like to play either with Bowling-stones [Lawn Bowls], throwing a Bowl at Nine-pins [Skittles] or strking a ball therow a Ring with a Bandy [Lawn Billiards] or scourging a Top with a Whip or Shooting with a Trunck [Blowpipe] and a Bow [Crossbow] or going upon Stilts or tossing and swinging themselves upon a Merry-totter [a Swing]