History of the Spools Games
China, Mesopotamia, America, and India
The histories of our games vary wildly in age and place of origin. Some are a few hundred years old, and one has relatives going back about 5,000 years. We change the materials, the weight, and the artwork, but we don't change the games. Here's where each one came from.
Mahjong
Mahjong emerged in China in the mid-to-late 1800s, during the Qing dynasty. Historians generally place its origins in eastern China, where it grew out of earlier Chinese card games that used similar suits. At some point the cards became tiles, and by the early 1900s the game was played across China and spreading through East and Southeast Asia.
Mahjong reached the United States in the early 1920s. Joseph Park Babcock, an American working for Standard Oil in China, simplified the rules for Western players, published Rules of Mah-Jongg, and began importing sets. By 1923 the game was a national craze. Demand got so high that sets were being made from whatever materials were available.
Over the next decade, American players developed their own version. In 1937 the National Mah Jongg League was founded in New York to standardize the rules, and American mahjong became its own game. It added jokers, the Charleston (a series of required tile passes before play begins), racks to hold each player's tiles, and an official card of winning hands that the League publishes every year. Because the card changes annually, no two years of American mahjong play quite the same.
For decades, the game was kept alive by weekly groups, many of them Jewish American women, who played at kitchen tables and community centers long after the 1920s craze faded. In recent years mahjong has had a major revival, with a new generation of players learning the game.
Tile materials have changed along the way. Early sets were bone and bamboo. In the 1930s and 1940s came Bakelite and Catalin, which are now collectible. Later sets moved to acrylic and melamine. Our tiles are 3D printed and partially hollow, which is how a full-size set ends up weighing 1.6 pounds.
Mahjong has been played and loved across China and East and Southeast Asia for generations. We're grateful to the communities who have kept it alive, and our tiles draw on the structure and spirit of traditional sets.
Read more: Mahjong and American mahjong on Wikipedia. Shop our mahjong sets.
Backgammon
Backgammon belongs to the oldest family of board games in the world: race games played with dice. Its ancestors include the Royal Game of Ur, played in Mesopotamia around 4,500 years ago, and a board with dice found at Shahr-e Sukhteh in Iran that dates back roughly 5,000 years.
In Persia, the game developed into nard. The Romans played a close relative called tabula, and one Roman game is so well documented that historians have reconstructed a specific losing position from a game played by the emperor Zeno in the 5th century. In medieval Europe, the family of games was known simply as "tables."
The name "backgammon" first shows up in English in the 1600s. The doubling cube, which lets a player raise the stakes mid-game, was added in the 1920s in New York gaming clubs and changed strategy completely. The game had a major boom in the 1960s and 1970s, when international tournaments made it even more fashionable.
We make our boards lighter and add magnetic closures, but the 15 checkers, 24 points, and two dice are the same ones players have been racing for centuries.
Read more: Backgammon on Wikipedia. Shop our backgammon sets.
Poker
Poker is the youngest game here, and the most American. It took shape in the early 1800s along the Mississippi River, around New Orleans and on riverboats. It likely borrowed from older European betting games, including the French game poque and the German game pochen. The earliest version used a 20-card deck and four players.
By the mid-1800s players had moved to the full 52-card deck, and new rules followed: the flush, draw poker, and stud poker, which spread during the Civil War. Texas hold'em developed in Texas in the early 1900s and reached Las Vegas in 1967. The World Series of Poker started in 1970, and in 2003 an amateur who qualified through an online tournament won the Main Event, setting off a poker boom that brought millions of new players to the game.
Chips have their own history. Early players bet with coins, gold, and whatever else they had on hand. Standardized clay chips became common in the late 1800s, and they're still the benchmark for how a chip should feel. Our chips are full size and weigh about one-fifth as much as clay, so the whole set can go camping.
Read more: Poker on Wikipedia. Shop our travel poker sets.
Chess
Chess traces back to India around the 6th century, to a game called chaturanga. Its pieces represented the four divisions of an ancient army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots. Those became the pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks we play with today.
The game traveled to Persia, where it became shatranj. The Persian phrase "shah mat," roughly "the king is helpless," is where the word checkmate comes from. Chess then spread through the Islamic world and into Europe by around the 10th century.
For centuries, the queen and bishop were weak pieces that moved only a short distance. That changed in the late 1400s in Spain and Italy, when the queen became the most powerful piece on the board and the game sped up dramatically. The rules have stayed mostly the same since.
The piece designs most people picture today, the Staunton pattern, were introduced in 1849. The first official World Chess Championship was held in 1886, and in 1997 IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world champion in a match.
We've made pieces shaped like dogs, and like wiener dogs specifically. They still move exactly the way chaturanga's army did.
Read more: Chess on Wikipedia. Shop our chess sets.
Keep playing
Every one of these games survived because people kept sitting down together to play them. That's the part we care about most. Learn more about what makes Spools sets different, or read our story.