The Tudors spans a time from 1485 to 1603 encompassing the reigns of Henrys VII & VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I.
Board Games
- Chess
- Tables (Backgammon)
- Nine Mens Morris (Mill)
- Draughts (the huffing rule arrived at some point in the 1500s)
- Fox and Geese or Fox and Hounds.
Games of Skill
- 'Butts' which is Archery
- There were many bowling alleys. This was not the game of bowls but skittles or nine-pins
- Lawn bowls was also played
- Tennis (Real Tennis, an indoor sport)
- Quoits
- Shove Ha'penny (or Shove Grote) - probably a pub game for the common people
- Shovelboard - A long disk shoving game that was played by the aristocracy
- Billiards - Mary Queen of Scots requested a Billiards table when she was imprisoned
Playing Cards and Dice Games
- Noddy, the ancestor of Cribbage
- Hazard was the longest standing popular dice game in Europe. The term "dicing house" was used frequently in texts of the time
- Main, a dice game with rules similar to the modern card game of Pontoon
- Maw, the ancestor of Spoil Five (Ireland: Twenty Five, Canada: Forty Five)
- Piquet
- Imperial
- Romero
- Pope Joan
Picture is a figure showing the path of a Noddy board. Note that is differs to a typical cribbage board.
Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, includes the following as suitable winter entertainment: "cardes, tables and dice, shovelboard, chesse-play". The royal household accounts include payments for 'two foxis and 26 hounds of silver overgilt' during the reign of Edward IV. In 1588, the Duke of Norfolk owned "a billyard bord covered with a green cloth.three billyard sticks and eleven balls of yvery."
