FACTORALY - E114 Board Games

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Board Games have been around since the Neanderthals, and one of the most modern board games is named after them (see below). Today, they are an excellent way for friends and family to get together and challenge each other. In this episode, we learn how to play various games, where they originated, and where they're headed. As always, click on the link to gamify your browser over at the show notes. https://www.factoraly.com/post/e114-boardgames Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Gooday, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling gaming, thank you very much. How are you? Gamy, like a meat pie. Yes, I've been hanging around for several days too long. That's good to know.

And hello to everyone listening to us. Yes, hello. Welcome to another exciting episode of Factorally. Factorily, that's right. How would you describe factorily, Bruce, to the uninitiated? It's two people who love the sounds of their own voices, rabbiting on for about 30 minutes, usually, about a subject that you may not actually care about to start with,

but by the time we finished, you might care a lot more. That is a beautiful summary. On the other hand, you might care a lot of. about it to start with, and don't think we're being complete idiots, not covering the subject at all. Yes. Which this week would be quite likely. Yes. We happen to have picked

an incredibly broad subject this week, which we thought would be nice and easy and narrow. It's not. Yeah. We thought board games were the ones that we've got in our cupboards. Yes. It turns out there are an awful lot more of them. And if you're tuning into an episode of Factorily hoping to learn about your favourite board game and we don't

cover it, apologies. There are a lot of them. There are So many. So where do we begin, Bruce? We begin at the very beginning. Normally with these things, it's either the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians or the Chinese. Yes. So where do we start, Simon?

We start in the Neolithic period. Oh, damn. It's none of those. All of those people were very much playing board games around the same time. But it seems. The oldest identifiable sort of board game pieces, which are something a little bit like chess pieces, but not quite, are from the Bronze Age, discovered in Turkey. They're sort of roughly 5,000 years old. But they've discovered some actual game boards without the pieces as early as around 7 or 8,000 BC, so the Neolithic period. So board games are older than anything else we've covered to date. There is some dispute as to what is the oldest single board game, and an awful lot of board games seem to have common roots. You know, if you trace chess back far enough, you get to a game that you can also get to if you trace backgammon far enough.

And also you can get to if you trace draughts far enough. Yeah. You get to this sort of common route. So there's a lot of dispute as to what is the oldest game. But one thing I kept on coming across was something called the Royal Game of Ur. Ur-spelt, you are. Okay, where Abraham went. That's the fella.

Yes. And it's a sort of a two-player strategy game. It looks rather chess-like but isn't exactly chess. Right. And this was allegedly first played in Mesopotamia somewhere around 3,000 or 4,000 BC. Okay. And that's the oldest game that we know and understand

and can actually still play today. Wow. Somehow or other. Boards have been found for this game as far away as Crete, Sri Lanka. And the first board was discovered by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley during excavations at the Royal Cemetery of Ur, which is why he gave it that name. So tell me about chess then. Right.

What makes chess special? We could do an entire episode on chess. Yes. We could, I know. Well, do you know why? Why? Because there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the Noble universe. Really?

So they've reckoned that there are 10 to the power of 120 possible chess games. In terms of the combinations of moves and so on. So you couldn't do the same one. Right, gotcha. So they're 10 with 120 zeros. That's a lot, isn't it? That's a lot. Whereas the atoms in the Noble universe, there are only 10.

10 to the power of 80. Gryking. I try to sort of get my head around exactly how popular chess is. It's impossible. It's officially the most popular board game in the world ever. Is that because people have been playing it longest or because it is the most popular? It's a bit of both.

I mean, it is very, very old and it is very popular. It's estimated around 600 million adults regularly play chess around the world today. Can you play? I can. I don't do so well. I am so rubbish at chess. I understand the rules. I understand how to make it work.

I can't do the strategic stuff. No, no. But yeah, it's something you really take for granted. You know, I've got a chess set. I haven't touched it in years. I sort of vaguely taught my son to play and that was it. But approximately 80% of households around the world have a chess board. It's just, it's everywhere.

Yes. I looked at the name chess. Apparently, it goes back to the Persian word shah, meaning king. King, yes. Oh, I guess, yes, because there's a king. Because it's all about the king. That then went into medieval Latin as skakus. Yeah.

That came into ancient Arabic. That came into French. That came into old English, etc. Eventually, it's come out as chess. One of the things I didn't know is that chess is a form of game called a capture game. Oh, is it? Yes. Oh.

And there are several capture games where you basically want to capture the other person's pieces. I see, yes. So another game, also very old, is drafts or checkers. Yes. Which is another capture game. Yeah. Not as popular as chess, really, although it's much simpler to play. So I don't know why it isn't as popular as chess. Yeah. We have show notes on this show. Yes, we do. If you go to our blog at factorily.com, you will find a page all about board games, you will find treatises from people who are fanatical about playing drafts slash checkers, depending on which country you're in. And they actually have like how to win at drafts and how to win quickly and lots of strategy. I mean obviously not as much strategy as chess.

Chess has a lot more options. Just because of its different pieces, you know, the fact that it has such a multitude of different ways of playing. And if we go back far and enough, we start off at an Indian game called Chaturanga. Very good. And that seems to be sort of the earliest identifiable thing that leads to chess. Right. Which I hadn't realised for a start. I didn't realize it had Indian origins.

But that name means four divisions, specifically the four divisions of the Indian military. Okay. Those being infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry. Oh, really? And those four divisions, over time got morphed and changed and, you know, westernised and all the rest of it, those four categories, those four divisions directly translate to the pawns, the knights, the bishops, and the rooks. Ah.

With obviously the king and the queen in between. And I hadn't realised this until fairly recently. I've always wondered why we call the castle the rook or the rook the castle. Yes. What's that now? That's never occurred to me. Why is that? It's occurred to me so many times that I've never got as far as looking it up until now.

In the original Indian game, the piece that we now called the Rook was called the Ruch, I-U-K-H, which meant chariot. One of those four subdivisions that I mentioned was the chariots. And originally the chariot was quite a heavily armored piece of equipment with, you know, sort of shield coverings and so on. It looked a little bit towery, fortressy. Over the years, that got changed. In Persia, that became one of those little towers on the back of an elephant. Oh, yes. You know, like the elephant can castle.

Yes. Eventually, the elephant got ditched and we got left with the castle, but it still had the word roch, meaning chariot. That's why the castle is the rook, or the rook is the castle. Do you know, if I learn nothing else from today, that is worth it. There you go. That's brilliant. You say that you can play a short game of chess.

Yeah, as long as I'm playing someone who's equally bad. Yes. But the thing that gets me is that actually does take quite a long time. Yes. There was a game of chess that started in 1926 and finished in 1982. Oh my goodness. Played by the same two people? Same two people. By correspondence? Yes, exactly by correspondence.

Really? Yes. That's amazing. And if you go to our blog, you'll find out all about that. Wonderful. It's such a metaphor for intellectual adversary, isn't it? I can think of so many movies or stories or whatever where the protagonist and the antagonist

regularly meet over a game of chess, you know, in the X-Men. Professor X and Magneto will occasionally just meet up whilst one of them's in prison and have a quick game of chess, throw a few verbal insults at each other and then go away again. Well, it's a trope for strategy, isn't it? Yes, it is. When I'm trying to describe fencing, I describe it as physical chess because you're sort of planning moves ahead.

Yeah, yeah. And that's what you tend to do. If you play chess well, you've played the whole game in your head before you even pick up a piece. Yes, that's right. That's what I don't get. I totally admire that, but I can't do it. Yeah.

So what are the games have we got, Bruce? Where have you had a look? Okay, shall we hit the big ones first? Go on. Also, the ones that are the most litigious. Monopoly. Yep. Do you know how long the longest game of Monopoly was?

No, I don't. It was 1,680 hours. Can you imagine how many arguments you'd have in 70 days of playing the same game of Monopoly? Oh, that's going to bring down a family, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, so Monopoly was one of those games that was invented by somebody who then sold it to somebody else

and then they saw it to somebody else. And then the person who originally invented Monopoly, whose woman called Elizabeth Maggie, is now getting credit for it. But at the time, didn't get any credit for it at all, apart from a few quid. And sold it to Parker Brothers. Well, she actually talked to somebody else. She's told it to somebody else.

And then eventually... It does seem to be a lot of that, doesn't there? Yes. I've invented this game. I can't market it. I'll sell it to you. We don't think it's very good. I'll sell it to someone else.

It becomes world famous. Yes. Do you know what? Because it's such a big subject, I didn't go into it in much detail. Did you? Just a little bit. Yeah.

So this lady Elizabeth Maggie, she created a game she originally called the Landlords game. And it was meant to be an educational tool to explain the... single tax theory. Okay. Weren't there two versions of it? One which was actually a capitalist one, one which was anti-capitalist. Yes, that's right. So she'd originally intended it to be an

illustration of the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. And she created two sets of rules. One was monopolist and one was anti-monopolis. Right. And it sort of tried to teach people the differences and the pros and cons of each system. and originally it was I suppose it makes total sense

but because my only experience of Monopoly is that it's based around the streets of London I'd kind of forgotten that it was an American invention Yes, all the streets in the original are well actually on all the streets in the very original are not even named it's like sort of Highworth Street Oh I see right

It just says that on her original plan for Monopoly Right And also it had a sort of like a walkway going around the incident side of the properties, which was designed to be like, that's your sort of your path that you're taking to work. And it's by completing that path that you get your $200 to spend. Oh, how interesting. And if you don't complete the path, you end up in jail. Yes. So by the time

the Parker Brothers got their hands on it, those streets were all named after streets in Atlantic City. Right. England got its hands on it in, well, exactly the same year, actually, in 1935, it just suddenly blew up and spread all over the place. Didn't I hear that somebody came over from America and asked somebody from London, like which are the posh areas and which are the least posh areas? And that was purely on one person's opinion. Oh, really? Is how you get the names of all the streets in UK Monopoly.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. Well, let's assume that's true. Yeah, let's assume that's true. What is definitely true is that in 1941, the British Secret Intelligence Service, got Waddington's board games to manufacture a special edition for World War II Prisoners of War. Yes. And I-9, my favourite M-I.

And inside these board games, they hid various tools for the prisoners of war to help them escape the Nazi prisoner of war camps. Yes, yes. They put maps, compasses, real money mixed in with monopoly money, in order to smuggle them inside the camps in order to get their, prisoners of war to escape. Maps on very fine silk. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And yeah, it's now after chess. Monopoly is the second most popular board game in the world, so we're going through them in the correct order. Over 275 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide. It's licensed in over 113 countries. So do you have to do the different streets? I've got a

copy of Monopoly, which is Star Wars edition. Yes, you have. Somebody else must have to go and ask somebody, what are the posh streets and what are the least posh streets? Well, yes, yeah. So it's licensed by different board game manufacturers in different countries, and they all have their own versions based on exactly the same premise. You know, where is your downtown area? Where is your slightly less affluent area? Yes. And it's pertinent to that country, yeah. Wow. favorite game is Scrabble. Very good. Third most popular board game in the world. Is it? Yep.

It goes chess, monopoly, Scrabble. Oh, right. Yeah. So, yeah, so given I'm a writer by belief and passion, Scrabble is an absolute winner for me. I love Scrabble completely. So do I. It's so good. And again, the person who invented it, had to fight for the right to use it.

It's awful. It's like the board game manufacturers who make this fun, fun for all the family. stuff. A right bunch of buggers. They're only in it for the money. Yeah. Yeah, of course they are. Do you know what Scrabble was initially called? No, go on. Chris Crosswords. Invented in 1931 by an American architect called Alfred Mosher Buts.

Wonderful name. Great name. He made a few sets. He took it to different board game manufacturers. No one really liked it. Eventually, someone who had acquired one of these sets actually bought the rights from him to try and publish it. Again, really limited success. He took it around a few companies. Eventually, someone said, yeah, okay, we'll take it off your hands. We'll rename it Scrabble. It might do quite well in sort of bookstores and things like that.

By 1954, it had sold nearly four million sets. Wow. So it did all right. Yes. There are some nice versions of Scrabble as well. You don't have to play Scrabble as Scrabble. For our 100th episode, if you go and have a look up our 100th episode, there's also different hundreds in there.

Yeah. And one of the hundreds is that there are 100 tiles in a Scrabble set. That's right. And it's based on the English language, which is why the cue is worth 10 and things like that. Although there are arguments now that because it's played in other languages, in other languages, some of the tiles should be worth a different amount of points. Yes, I've read that. Apparently they actually are in different countries. they are given different numerical values depending on the frequency of that letter's use

in that language. Given that it's played in 121 countries. Is it really? Yeah. And they have a different set for each of the 121 countries. It's mad. There are about 170 million games of Scrabble played every year. Good grief.

Wow. So I'm going to tell you about two other versions of Scrabble that you can play. Go on. One is called Princeton Rules, which I was taught by the woman who wrote nothing acts faster than anadine, which is technically

true because nothing, everything acted exactly the same rate as anadine, so nothing acts faster than that. Oh, clever. Yeah, she's very good. And she taught me a version called Princeton Rules Scrabble. Right. Which is where you can substitute other letters in already laid

words for letters in your own hand. So if someone's put toe, T-O-E, and you want a T and you've got an R in your hand, you can swap the T front R to make row on the board and then take the T out and use the T in the next word that you lay down. You have to use the letters you pick up from the board on the board for your next word. Now, I vaguely remember actually playing that way with my parents when I was a lad.

I had always just assumed it was a friendly thing that they did in order to sort of give me a better chance of winning when I was a kid. I didn't realize that was an official variant. Yeah, no, it's actually a proper official variant, as is clabbas. Clabbas? So clabbas is an anagram of scrabble. Yes, I can see that. Okay. So the idea is that you're allowed to put words down, not necessarily in the right order.

So if you've got a word like step, but you can't find a place to put step, but you could find a place to put P-T-E-S, you could do that. Oh. Because you say, well, that's step or pets or whatever it happens to be. Yes, okay. But you've just spelled it wrong. But because there's an anagram of it that could be spelled correctly, you can put that on the board.

How interesting. I'm playing all the right letters. It's just not necessarily in the right order. Exactly. Shall we talk about Cludeau? Oh, yeah, let's do that. I used to love Cludeau. Yes, me too.

You know, the good old Dr. Black. He was the one of him. who got killed, wasn't he? He got killed in Tudaclos, which is the name of the house. Is it? Yeah. So the name of the house in Cludeau is Tudor Close. Oh.

And you talked about patent issues on Scrabble. I mean, Cludeau is nuts. Clude was invented in the UK. It was a mixture of Clue and Ludo. Yes. And the chap who invented it quite liked it. He thought it was quite a good game. And it was doing reasonably well in the UK.

And let's say Parker Brothers, because the company was eventually Parker Brothers. It's always them. Decided that they would basically nick it. Oh. And launch it in America as the Sherlock Holmes game because they had the rights to Sherlock Holmes. No. So they started to produce it in America and it went gangbusters in America. It was so good.

Yeah. And then they changed it to Clue in America, not Cludeau. And then they talked to the guy who. invented cludo in the UK and said i mean it's doing okay in the UK but you know we haven't really looked at doing it worldwide could you sell us the worldwide rights right when it was already selling in america and they basically conned this guy into thinking that he's just you know getting a few quid for some worldwide sales that didn't exist when the the game was massive tut tut not good one of my favorite movies he's called

called Clue, and it's based on the board bar. Oh, yes. Starring Tim Curry. Yeah, Tim Curry's the butler, isn't he? That's right, yeah. Christopher Lloyd is Professor Plum. Haven't they changed some of the characters lately to make it more sort of...

Oh, I heard that, yes. There's a female doctor, I think, now. Right, I think originally there was a Reverend Green, wasn't there, and I think he got swapped out as a different profession at some point. I think that's now the doctor one. Is it? Yes.

I mean, talking of, you know, the bits, there's been a lot of changes to the pieces that you play with in Monopoly. Hmm. There's now a dinosaur. Is there? Why is there a dinosaur? I mean, there's still the hat. Yes. That's interesting, isn't it?

Somewhere around the house, I've got a rather old set that I used to play on as a kid. And you knew exactly where you stood, that the pieces were, you know, they were metal, they were weighty. You had a little Scotty dog. You had a battleship, you had an iron, a top hat, a shoe, and a couple of other things. A thimble. Oh, yes, the thimble, that's right. Racing car. A racing car, that's it.

Well done. And now they're flimsy little light, plasticy pieces, and they're all sort of cartoony and stylized. And now you're telling me there's a dinosaur involved? I mean, they used to be lead. Well, yes. So after they were lead, they were something that wasn't going to poison you when you stick it in your mouth. I've done no research on this at all. I think it might even be you who told me this in passing that the Monopoly Man, the guy with the top hat, is actually based on a real person.

Yes, J.P. Morgan. His official name is either Rich Uncle Pennybags or Melbourne Pennybags is his first name. Really? Yeah, yeah. That's great. He's based on J.P. Morgan. He's based on J.P. Morgan. That's fantastic.

And everybody thinks he wears a monocle and he doesn't. No, he doesn't. No. No. Which is weird. It's one of those misremembering. things yes it's cool i think it's called mandela effect the mandela effect that's right yeah yes i always mix up in my mind uh the the picture of mr pennybags and um the face from pringles crisps yes not terribly similar but you know see a episode on potatoes there you go we talk a lot about pringles in that one hyperbolic parableoid well done thank you very much Going back to chess, sort of there have been all sorts of iterations of chess.

One of my favourite iteration of chess is actually was quite a recent one. It's called chess boxing. Oh, right. I've not heard of that. So chess boxing is basically exactly what it sounds like. You have one round of chess, three minutes, and then you have one round of boxing. Now, to me, this doesn't make sense. It's like it's supposed to be like intellect and brute force. Yes, the brain and the brawn.

Exactly, where brain meets brawn. The thing is, if you're a really good boxer, in round one, you could probably knock out a really nerdy chess champion, and then you'd have won the game. Yes. So, again, we've got some video of chess boxing on the show notes. Have a look. It's weird. I would really like to think that they sort of maintain a strict weight class system.

Because, yeah, that would be entirely unfair. Okay, so it would be like kilos. versus IQ points. Yes, exactly that, yeah. So let's sort of have someone with the highest IQ, lowest body mass fight each other. And then sort of, as you go along,

the IQ lowers and the body mass increases. Increases. Yeah. If I can find the rules, I'll put them on the show notes. Great. One of my favorite board games is Matt Gammon. I love a game of Batgammon.

Oh, yes. Have you lost much money? No, I've never paid for money But I had a quick look at the history of Batgammon It possibly takes its roots All the way back to the Royal Game of Ur Just like Chess does Right

There are a lot of games that claim to be derived From the same source But Badgammon I didn't realize this Is part of a class of board game Called Tables games And if you picture a Batgammon board It has those four quadrants Which are called tables

and there are lots of other games that also do that that aren't backgammon the name backgammon first recorded in the 1600s originally bagamom comes from the words back and game

and it refers to the fact that the gameplay in backgammon goes back and forth your pieces kind of travel in both directions sometimes you're winning sometimes you're losing and that's where the name came from the only thing that springs to my mind when I hear backgammon is Omar Sharif

yes who used to play it quite well apparently for money yeah it's um it's a gorgeously sort of um turkish looking game well it's it's been very popular in turkey and greece and and there are two rule derivations of it you can either play the turkish rules or the greek rules um but yeah you sort of picture sort of sitting in a very very tiled courtyard drinking a small cup of coffee smoking a shisha having a game of backgammon it's it's a very evocative game in that sense Well, it's a bit like in China playing Go or Mahjong. Yes. Yeah.

And I do play Go. Well, I haven't played Go for a long time. But I used to play Go quite a bit. I like the noise of the counters going down. Yes. On the board. It's a nice thing. My dad used to love playing Chinese checkers.

Oh, okay. Which is sort of a board game with balls. It's a capture game. Right. So when you jump over a ball, you capture the ball and then you take it off the off the board. I see. Which reminds me of my, I saw, in researching this, I saw Chinese checkers and oh, it's nice. Oh, that's dad. It's very similar to Nine Men's Morris, which is a British version of a similar thing. Oh, I've not heard of that. Oh, yeah. Well, again, show notes.

Yeah. You'll find out all about it. So we've been talking about games that have been around for a very long time. And there are a lot of board games. There's, um, there are some which spark off all sorts of other games. There's one called apples to apples. Right. Which sparked off things like cards against humanity and comet below and what do you mean? All those games. Yeah. Um, one of my favorite games, because I'm, I like words, is called poetry for Neanderthals. Okay. And what it is, you get cards and a card has a word on it. And you have to get somebody else to, to guess what the thing on the card is. Right.

But they're not allowed to use words of more than one syllable. Okay, right. And in the set, you get this two-foot-long inflatable club. And if they use more than one syllable, you can hit them over the head with it with the inflatable club. Great. It's one of my favorite games, along with exploding kittens, which is another great modern game.

Yes. But there are some really cracking ones. If you like Shakespeare, there's one called Black Sonata. Okay. which is about finding the Dark Lady in Shakespeare sonnets. Oh. And that came out in about 2017. Yeah.

There's one called Tobago, which came out in 2009, which is a treasure hunting game. Right. There's one which is a code cracking board game. Came out in 2022 called Turing Machine. Oh, nice. And there's another one called Operation Barclay, which came out in, actually, this year, 2025 which is a like it's a war poker code type of game and then that the ones that are very popular are things like captain sonar which is it's like battleships okay but it was invented in

2016 but it's like a real-time battleships with like sonar screens and things like that you can you can move around it's very interesting fun and and the one of the most popular ones is called fast sloths where you it's like a delivery game it's a It's a capture game with animals and all sorts. It's wild. Again, that was invented in 2019. So people are still inventing and creating board games for a different generation of people. They're very inventive.

There are so many different variations. I'm fascinated by the current culture of board game cafes. Yes. Of which there are, you know, quite a few around your neck of the woods in London. And I've been to a couple of these with friends. And, you know, it's like a lending library of board games. You sort of stand there and look at the... these shelves after shelves

after shelves of different board games and you sort of occupy your table for a set amount of time. Yes. Can you join in other people's games? If they are okay with you doing so, yes. Totally, yeah. You're free to mingle. Cool. And you get everything from, you know,

someone going in for a quick cup of coffee and a game of Snap to someone who's, you know, rented a table for an entire day and they're playing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, you know, and everything in between. They're great fun. I once played a game of risk.

for a whole weekend without sleep Oh my goodness The deals that we were negotiating Towards the end were very silly Yes, I bet Yeah, I've got a Star Wars version of risk Wow That's quite good

Games can be quite useful in teaching you things There's one to teach you how to make children Okay So in Finland the population was dropping And they decided to make a game called How to Make Children Oh my goodness And it was like an anatomical thing

And it was explaining about how you make kids Again if you go to the show notes I'll see if I can find a family appropriate version Of how to make children And you can go and have a look there Oh there's the game of life I've just remembered I used to play You sort of go through

From being born to getting an education To finding a job to getting married Buying a car having children and buying a home, getting home insurance, et cetera, et cetera, and eventually dying. Wow. I remember the name of the game of life, but I don't remember. It was utterly, utterly linear. You sort of bought a little plastic car, and then you hopped from square to square saying,

would you rather have a child or go on an exotic holiday? And then you sort of choose your path, and then further down that path, you have other decisions that are based on your previous decisions. And then you get to the end, and whoever has amassed the most wealth, essentially, is the winner. Wow. Yeah, quite interesting. That's amazing.

One of the things about factorily is that it's all about facts. It's all about trivia. Yes. So you would think that our favourite game would obviously be trivial pursuits. Of course you would, yes. But I think it was a trend, wasn't it? It was like created around about the end of the 1970s, early 1980s. Yes.

And it was such a hit. Yeah. I mean, in 1981, it was bigger than monopoly. Oh, really? They sold more Trivial Pursuit than Monopoly. It's invented by a couple of Canadian guys. Okay. Everything to do with Trivial Pursuit was made in Canada.

And they got all the questions done there. That's why a lot of the original ones on the sort of original edition were American or Canadian base. There are now over a hundred different editions still going that you can buy now. of trivial pursuit in different languages, different specialisms, different everything.

Different levels. You know, children, older person, some based on Nickelodeon for kids. Specialist subjects, yeah. Exactly. You know, highly specialist subjects. In fact, as you're saying that, I played a game of Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit

just a few weeks ago. I went to a pub. This is another place that you're suddenly finding board games is in pubs. Yes. I went to a pub a little while ago, and they had a sort of a compendium of board games,

and one of them was Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit. It was a card-based game rather than a board. So it was sort of a bit more quick fire. But, yes, I used to love Trival Pursuit. I remember having massive arguments as to whether the little pieces in Trivial Pursuit should be called pizza slices or cheese wedges. Wedges, I think.

Yeah. That's what I always went with. I once had a bit of a sniffy route. with some people that I met on holiday with my ex-wife. And we got chatting to them. And they said, oh, do you like playing Trivial Pursuit? We went, oh, we love it. This is in the sort of like the mid-80s.

And they said, oh, we've got to set up in our room. You know, we can bring it down to the bar and we can have a game of Trivial Pursuit. I went, that's great, you know, because it's quite new and exciting. So we played them and they won. And my wife is no slouch and neither am I. when it comes to intellectual understanding and knowledge. And one of them, when they said the answer, we said that's not the right answer.

And they said, yes, it is. That's what it says on the card. Oh. And what they had done is they had memorized the whole set of every single card in trivia pursuit. Cheat-ee-McCheed faces. Oh, yes. Good. That's amazing.

So as soon as we discovered this, we kind of just lost completely. interest in the game and in the couple that were playing the game and just basically walked away wow yeah well well done for taking the moral high ground thank you very much and for getting the question right yes exactly are there any records about games i mean we've we've mentioned like the longest game of chess and the longest game of monopoly but are there too are there any records he says yes there are are. Really? There are multiple records for every single game. Wow.

Biggest gathering, fastest game, highest amount of money spent. It's absurd. I've picked a few. The Guinness World Record for the largest collection of board games owned by an individual belongs to a fellow called Jeff Borsby's in America. He owns, well, owns as of 2011 when he got this record, so it's probably increased by now. But at that point, he owned one. 1,531 different and individual board games. Do you think he plays all of them? I don't know. I'd really like to think that he knows how to play all of them.

I would hope that he's played each one once. They're not just still in the cellophane. Yeah, no, quite. Some of the more interesting titles of board game that he owns are stick it to the IRS and Chicago's Great Blizzard. see the people who are coming up with the games are obviously a certain type of person yes they are that's brilliant i found the record for the largest board game tournament ever which was a chess tournament in the philippines it consisted of 43,157 participants

all school children and this was in 2012 and it was it was set up as a massive massive national chess league to find the best chess player amongst the school children of the Philippines. So it's like a knockout. Yes, exactly, yeah, like a knockout. The person who win.

Because you see these things where people are playing like seven different people all at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Central Park and things like that. Absolutely. My last record I found

is the world's largest board game which measures 106 square meters. That's quite a lot. Yeah, but it is quite big, isn't it? Yes. And I'm really beginning to wish I hadn't picked this one now

because it's got a lot of interesting pronunciations in it, Bruce. It was made by a group of people from Austria, who I'm not going to try and pronounce their names. It was made by a group of people in Austria. There we go. In 2019, the board game in question was called DKT, which stands for Das Kaufmannisch Talent.

Okay. Which translates as the commercial talent. Yes. It's a little bit like monopoly. Okay. But yes, just over a thousand square meters, this giant and playable board game. You know, it's not just there for aesthetics.

You can move things. Pieces. The pieces must be quite big as well. It must be massive, yeah. Well, I've run out of pieces. Yes, I think it's check and mate for me. Oh, very good. So thank you ever so much for listening.

What we would like you to do now, before you go, is to make sure that you don't miss another episode of this. So could you please? Press the subscribe button. Please do. And every Thursday, when you wake up in the morning, you can look at your podcast player, and there'll be another episode of Factorily there, waiting for you. What a way to start the day.

Isn't it a great way? What else can they do, Simon? Well, people could kindly go and give us a little review and a little rating. Oh, yeah. Well, do you know, well, there's actually a game called One Star Review. Oh, okay. Which we don't want. No, so go and get five sets of that game.

Yes. And give us that. And then of course you can go and tell all of your board game playing friends about this podcast so that they can listen along and join in the fun. Yes, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can either yell at this in the street or you can write to hello at factorily.com or you can get on Facebook. So thank you all for coming along and listening to us today. Please come again next time for another fantastically fun-filled factual episode of

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