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The Origin of Doubling

Posted By: David Levy
Date: Friday, 31 August 2012, at 11:04 p.m.

In Response To: The Origin of Doubling (Chris Bray)

The article from Harper's is quite interesting. Perhaps some of our European members with an interest in research could explore local periodicals of the time and trace this back further.

A few glosses on the article:

  • Chouette is an old French gaming term for the play of a two-handed game by more than two players. For example I discuss a 1765 book on the card game of piquet in a recent blog post. Interestingly, the book has parallel French on English text. The English text reads:
    When three persons play at this game, he who plays alone against the other two is called the Chouette, the two other who are together may consult together...(page 51)
    We use the term a bit differently today.

  • Although many tables games used three dice (for example, the Italian sbaraglino used first three dice, then two with an invariant throw of a six instead of the third dice), trictrac was not one of them. See the rules of trictrac on my web site. For a good discussion of many tables variants, see Murray, A History of Board Games other than Chess. Oxford: Clarendon 1952.

  • Years ago, I posted on GammOnLine that something very much like the doubling cube was used in the 17th century. You can see that post and followup comments on Backgammon Galore here.

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