Links: Gaming in Uganda and Egypt; Winning Awards in Italy and France

Like every other ancient board game we know, Fifty-eight Holes is a "race game," capturing the heat of the most basic forms of human contest. "It's like a horse race or a running race, reduced to miniature," Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist at the British Museum, said. Finkel, who has a blizzard of a beard and hair to match, writes children's books with titles like "Swizzle de Brax and the Blungaphone." He is also arguably the world's foremost expert of bygone board games. "The race-game class is the first one we have," he said. When boards of Fifty-eight Holes were first retrieved from tombs, they were imbued with the symbolism of their funerary surroundings, their circular nature compared to that of life. The truth, Finkel said, is simpler. "It was often too hot or too difficult, or there were long periods of time when there was bugger all to do," he said. "Board games were played to fill time — for fun, for pleasure."