The Surprising Origins of Popular Game Names
Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. Perhaps the earliest archaeological evidence we have of gaming comes from the cradle of civilization, in Sumerian Mesopotamia, where the remains of sheep huckle-bones have been found in a context highly suggestive of their having been used in divination, gaming, or most likely both.
Some games, such as backgammon, enjoy incredible antiquity, and have been transmitted along trade routes and across linguistic barriers for centuries, and now find themselves played by new generations in the form of cross-platform apps on smartphones and tablets. This all, naturally, has an impact on what a game ends up being called.
Many of the games we know and love today have undergone several name-changes over their lifespans, often for fascinating or unexpected reasons. Below we’re going to take a look at some of the most surprising and interesting of these.
Texas Hold’ Em
The best known variant of perhaps the most popular card game in the world, the game that would come to be known as Texas Hold ‘Em went through several transmutations before finding itself in the Lone Star state. More than any other variant, this game has become an enduring classic right through to the present day enjoyed both in physical and online contexts across the globe.
Poker’s origins itself are unclear, with some citing its earliest ancestor to be among the domino-style games of late Tang-dynasty China, from which we also get today’s Mah-Jong. The earliest game that bears an obvious connection to poker is the Persian card game As Nas, which dates to the 16th century Safavid dynasty, an empire which ruled over a Central Asian region with the territory of modern-day Iran at its heart.
From there, presumably along the well established trade-routes, the game resurfaces in 17th century France under the recognizable name of Poque. Following the European colonization of the Americas, poker and many other card games made the jump across the pond, where they took root as popular pastimes along frontier towns from the Oregon trail to the far south-west.
Texas Hold’ Em itself is a variant credited to having been invented in Robstown, Texas, near the south-eastern coastal city of Corpus Christi, in the 1920s. That explains the “Texas”, but what about the “Hold ‘Em”? Well anyone who’s played it will know that one of the core elements of this game is the fact that you have to keep hold of your initial cards through-out a hand.
This makes it distinct from other variants that permit players to draw more cards, which fans say enables it to strike the perfect balance between chance and strategy to create compelling gameplay.
Chess
Few games played so widely today can profess to being as old as chess. The earliest evidence we have for this game comes from the Indian subcontinent during the time of the Gupta empire in the 6th century. At this time, the game was referred to as chaturanga, a name which is still in use for its descendant in India today.
Chaturanga is Sanskrit, and means four-armed or four-limbed. It refers to the traditional military divisions of land armies of the time into infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. These correspond in modern chess to the pawns, knights, bishops and rooks respectively. This clearly proves that, from its earliest origins, the family of games to which chess belongs has been used as a training tool for applied military strategy and tactics.
Before long, chaturanga found its way north along the silk-route to the neighboring Sassanid Persian empire, where it took on its recognizable form under the name Shah, the Persian word for King. From there, it made its way across the Islamicate world before entering Europe in the early mediaeval period via the Byzantine Empire and the Iberian peninsula.
Today’s English name, chess, is little more than a mis-translation of Shah into a culture and context unaware of its meaning. In some places on the continent itself the word survives in a more recognizable form, such as the German, Schach. Interestingly, the term “check-mate”, also comes from Persian, in this case, the phrase “Shah-Mat”, or “The King is Dead”.