Footnotes :  

221 Walter Endrei: “Spiele und Unterhaltung im alten Europa”, Dausien Verlag, Hanau, 1988, page 41.
 

222 This game tabletop is now in the Landesmuseum Joanneum at Graz in Austria and reproduced in Erwin Glonnegger: “Das Spiele-Buch: Brett- und Legespiele aus aller Welt, Herkunft, Regeln, und Geschichte”, Hugendubel Verlag, Ravensburg, 1988, pages 42 and 43.
 

223 Erwin Glonnegger: “Das Spiele-Buch”, cited above, page 40.
 

224 From “West- östlicher Diwan”, as quoted in Walter Endrei: “Spiele und Unterhaltung im alten Europa”, Dausien Verlag, Hanau, 1988, page 42, my translation.
 

225 Erwin Glonnegger: “Das Spiele-Buch”, cited above, page 40.
 

226 Stewart Culin: “Korean Games”, 1895, edition consulted Dover, New York, 1991, see footnote 2 on page 79.

227 Stewart Culin: “Chess and Playing Cards: Studies in Play and Games”, 1896, edition consulted Arno Press, New York, 1976, see pages 843 to 848.
 

228 La Ludothèque, 6 Avenue de Domont, 95160 Montmorency, France.
 

229 Silvia Mascheroni and Bianca Tinti: “Il gioco dell’ Oca”, Bompiani, Milan, 1981.

  The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk. Copyright 2012 by Peter Aleff    by Peter Aleff            Scroll 28

6.2. The modern spiral Goose Game

A modern counterpart of this ancient Snake Game with the Goose head has standardized marks on many of its fields. This is the “Game of the Goose”, a children’s race game played with dice on a spiral-shaped racetrack with 63 fields that represent the player’s journey through life and death to heaven.

The Game of the Goose popped onto the stage of history fully fledged and in regal finery, like the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena who was said to have sprung fully grown from the cranium of Zeus, and in full battle-gear.  It entered our documented record with the magnificently crafted copy that Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Renaissance Florence in Italy from 1574 to 1587 and a cultural leader closely allied with the royal houses of Spain and Austria, sent to king Philip II of Spain (1527 to 1598). The game was said to have been invented for the Duke, and to have caused great excitement at the Spanish court²²¹.

Shortly thereafter, in 1589, the Archduke Karl of Austria, a relative of Philip, received for his wedding with a Bavarian princess a stone playing table with a spiral board for a “Game of Fortune” beautifully etched into its top. This now cracked gameboard table, attributed to a local artist and preserved in a museum in Austria, displays also the rules for the game, plus the musical notes and words for a song in four voices²²².

Except for its name, that “Game of Fortune” is virtually identical with the Game of the Goose and has the same special fields with mostly the same names and pictures in the same places. 

The geese from the Goose board have been replaced by a goddess of Fortune on her wheel and various winged angels, statues of people, and riders on horseback, but these are in the same locations as the geese on the Goose board whereas all the non-event fields are decorated only with flowers. The rules on that “Fortune” tabletop are also the same as those for the Goose game.

This pair of high-level introductions may account for the “Royal” title which often became part of the game’s name as a celebrity-based marketing booster. With and without this title, reproductions of the Goose Game appeared soon all over Europe and became very popular as a gambling game.

In 1597, a John Wolfe in London published “A new and most pleasant game of goose”, and in 1612 the doctor assigned to the young French king Louis XIII noted in his diary that the royal child liked to play his Goose Game²²³.

It is likely that little Louis played Goose not just for fun but that his conscientious teachers had given him his copy for its educational value.  In addition to the obvious advantages that it taught counting and reading, its setbacks were considered great for character building, and it also elevated the players’ souls.  We learn this from the blurbs on some of its early boards which describe the journey of the gamepieces as a simulation of the players’ own pilgrimage through life with its ups and downs.

The edifying comments and moralizing exhortations in those comments are quite similar in tone to those maxims of the Old Kingdom sage Ptah-hotep which that ancient Egyptian schoolboy above had abandoned in mid-sentence to play Senet instead. By incorporating such sayings right into the course of the game, the Goose Game designers bypassed that schoolboy's later successors’ intuitive rejection of this otherwise less palatable fare. There is no evidence, however, that these later players digested and absorbed those worthy principles any more than the ancients had.

The game’s imitation of life also inspired many adults. For instance, the German arch-poet von Goethe (1749 to 1832) used it as a melancholy metaphor for our fate, as illustrated by the death field :

“Life is but a Game of Goose:
the more you advance,
the sooner you reach the goal
where no one likes to be.”²²⁴

6.2.1. Continued links from Goose to Snake and time

As in ancient Egypt, the Goose coexisted on that spiral board with the Snake because the same game on the same spiral track was also known under that designation. The oldest recorded copy of that version came out in England around 1690 as “The royal pass-tyme of cupid or the new and most pleasant game of the snake”, and it had the same 63 fields with the same special events in the same locations along the track as the Goose game²²⁵. More recently, in 1895, the game historian and museum curator Stewart Culin reported that

“in northern Europe, [the Goose Game] is frequently called the Snake Game, as in England, and again in Sweden where it is known as the Orm Spel”²²⁶  [= Snake Game].

Other variants of the Goose game were sold, too. A quite frequently printed one featured monkeys or apes instead of geese, a curious choice since, as we saw above, a baboon was the form of the Egyptian board game inventor god Thoth when he was portrayed in his time-keeper function.

This identification was so strong that the makers of Egyptian water clocks often fashioned their upper vessel in the shape of a squatting baboon who voided his water into the lower one. It seems therefore quite possible that the Monkey variant of the Snake- and-Goose Game may represent a survival of this ancient simian connection with the flow of time.

Other editions of the same game were themed on voyaging in trains and the like, and a current version is named for a popular cartoon bear whose licensed picture replaces the free-flying geese. However, even these modified versions usually maintained that same spiral track with the same jump-doubling marks and event fields in the same places.

By the late 1800s, Stewart Culin listed 146 different editions of this game, in eleven languages, as held in the collection he curated at the Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia²²⁷.

In more recent decades, several exhibitions were organized in Europe around the Goose Game.  For instance, in the early 1990s an itinerant show in France presented 160 Goose Games, dating from about 1750 on, under the title: “The Goose Game: reflections of a society through its history”²²⁸.

Similarly, a beautiful coffee-table book published 1981 in Italy about “Il gioco dell’ Oca” reproduces a large collection of Goose boards from all over Europe.  Its purpose is to remind people how the diverse designs and themes for the track of this enduring game constitute an artistic heritage and illustrate the changing preoccupations of the people who played the game over the centuries²²⁹.

A 2005 web search for the Goose Game showed it is still very much alive. For instance, it had its own prominent section at an art festival in Belgium, and a TV contest in Spain was organized to follow the advances and setbacks and other special events along its life-depicting track.

6.2.2. The special fields in the Goose Game

These “special event” fields on the Goose board are consistently the same on most of its many copies and variants in whatever guise.  They are:

• a “Bridge” at 6 which makes the player pay a toll but advances the pieces that land on it by six spaces to field twelve;

• an “Inn” at 19 where the pieces rested and lost two turns;

• a “Well” at 31 which trapped the piece falling into it until another piece arrived to release it and then stayed in its place;

• a “Maze” at 42 which sent the pieces back, usually by twelve steps to field 30 although some copies are here more lenient and impose shorter setbacks;

• a “Prison” at 52 with the same penalty as the “Well”;

• a “Death” field at 58 that sent the pieces back to field 1 where they had to start all over again.

• the “Goal” or “Door” or “Heaven” at 63 where the pieces were “borne”.

In addition, fields five, nine, fourteen, eighteen, twenty-three, twenty-seven, thirty-two, forty-one, forty-five, fifty, fifty-four, fifty-nine, and sometimes also sixty-three are marked with a goose.  The first twelve of these goose fields double the jump of the piece that lands on them;  the last one is merely there for decoration because the piece arriving there gets off the board anyway.