Board games from the city of Vijayanagara (Hampi ... - Gioco dell'Oca.

12
B OARD G AME S TUDIES 6, 2003
Vilhelmina is situated in an area with a mixed Swedish- and Sámi-speaking population,
while Boda is situated to the south of the part of Sweden inhabited by Sámit. It
seems that we have no evidence of this game being played in Denmark, Norway or by
the Sámit in Sweden or Norway, nor do we know of any parallels to the particular dice
stick used in Boda. The somewhat different shape of the dice, combined with the eastern
distribution area of this game makes it rather unlikely that there was any direct connection
between this type of stick dice and that used in daldøs(a) and sáhkku.
It would certainly be interesting to know more about the dice sticks used in the
Finnish and Estonian versions of this game, but I have not been able to find any information
about that subject.
‘Put-and-take’ teetotums and dice sticks
In a recent article in Danish (Michaelsen 2002) I have discussed various designations
of ‘put-and-take’ and teetotum games. A large part of my article is devoted to the
Danish dialect names used for these games, but I also discuss a number of foreign game
names. Various variants of sáhkku were played along the coasts of Nordland, Troms and
Finnmark in Northern Norway, in the area around the Norwegian-Russian border, in the
extreme north of Finland, on Spitzbergen, and in Siberia. (8)
At least two Sámi peoples used to play not only sáhkku, but also a much simpler
game of chance with dice. This tradition was described by Toivo Immanuel Itkonen in
1941. (9) The Skolt Sámit used to play with a 4- or 8-sided dice top, named kieppa-ker’tsa,
which had numbers on it. The four-sided top had an X and vertical or horizontal
lines (Fig. 4), while the eight-sided top had a blank side and Arabic numbers from 1-7
or an X and numbers from 15-21.
The Inari Mountain Sámit of Northern Finland played with an 11-sided dice top,
named pir’tsu like the sáhkku game and the dice used in that area. Each side had 1-10
horizontal cross lines indicating the number of points. The eleventh, blank side corresponded
to zero points (Fig. 5). This was spun around in a kneading-trough, around
which the participants, not more than 11 persons, were sitting. The Swedish-speaking
minority of Finland knew a similar tradition, playing a game of chance with a four-sided
trissa, which was a dice top with 1-4 ristor (strokes). (10)
It is easy to find points of resemblance between the design of these dice tops and the
design of the sáhkku dice. It is much more difficult to tell how these similarities arose.
The tradition of using crosses, cross lines, and blank sides on the dice is probably older
among the Sámit than the use of Arabic numerals. We know from Johannes Scheffer’s
Lapponia, printed in Frankfurt in 1673, that the Sámit north of the Bothnic Bay already
then used to play with wooden dice with a cross cut into one of the sides. (11)
Cross lines and other lines resembling Roman numerals are also found on the sticks
used in a variant of the spellicans or jackstraw game, played by Sámit and Swedes in
Jämtland in Northern Sweden. In Swedish this game is called påfvespel (‘pope game’) or
stöupstickan. (12) (Fig. 6) Some of the signs on these sticks are very similar to those found
on the sáhkku dice, but, on the other hand, possible non-European parallels make it
plausible that to some extent such markings are actually universal symbols. (13)