Free printable historical game boards for International Games Month

November is International Games Month, and if you are putting something together for it on a budget of nothing, this may save you an afternoon.

Vâliçe Press has released the companion materials for its reference book on traditional games free and un-gated: 31 printable game boards, each scaled to fill a Letter sheet, plus a game index, cut-out rule cards and score sheets. No signup, no email capture, no account to create.

Print them on card, add counters or dried beans, and a table can run from Mesopotamia to Aotearoa without anyone buying anything. The pack includes boards for Nine Men's Morris, Alquerque, Hnefatafl, Senet, the Royal Game of Ur, Fox and Geese, Mū Tōrere, Xiangqi and Shogi. They are diagrams rather than text, so they work regardless of a player's reading level or first language — which matters if you are running a public session and have no idea who will walk in.

The boards are drawn from The Great Book of World Games, which collects 56 traditional games from 39 cultures, spanning roughly 4,600 years back to the Royal Game of Ur, played from about 2600 BC.

One thing worth knowing before anyone stands up and explains a game to a room: seven of those 56 rule sets are marked in the book as scholarly reconstructions rather than recorded rules — Senet, the Royal Game of Ur, Hnefatafl, Tablut, Patolli, Chaturanga and Polis. In each case the sources preserve the board and the pieces but not every rule. Games books routinely print reconstructed rules as though they were attested, and a reader has no way to tell the difference. If you are about to say how Egyptians played Senet, it is worth adding that nobody actually knows.

The printable pack is free and stays free. The book itself is a paid paperback and ebook, and none of the material above requires it.