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

P. M ICHAELSEN, ON SOME UNUSUAL TYPES OF STICK DICE 19
half as many strikes are to be made. Should it rest inside the circle one man from the outteam
is out. Should it rest inside the circle with the cross (krøss) upwards, then two men
are out. Should it rest outside the circle with the krøss upwards, then one man from the
out-team is out. In nixepinne the side of the dice stick named nix had a similar function.
In the Scotch strac agus cat there is no cross on the dice stick, but only the numbers 1,
2, 3, 4. These numbers count if the person who throws the cat does not strike the strac,
which is the 18 inches long bat laid across the opening of a hole, seven yards away. In
the Faroese exebiti, the Norwegian abeseditt and the West-Flemish wiep-slaan and
duzend-slaan, the numbers on the dice stick are larger, up till 100 in the Norwegian and
Flemish games. In these games they directly indicate the number of points scored.
If we now return to the above-mentioned Lang Larence from Yorkshire, we may perhaps
have found a possible explanation of the signs on its sides. The ten crosses and the
zigzag forming a W or triple V, are also found on the Flemish dice sticks, in which the
crosses have the value 100 and W is an abbreviation of ‘wiep’ with the value of ‘niets’, that
is nothing. It makes good sense that the side named flush, which allows the player to take
all stakes, is connected with a high number like 100, while the side named lave all, which
neither takes or gives, is marked with a letter standing for zero. It is also easy to see why
the side put doan two has been given the double value of the side sam up one: 6 and 3,
respectively.
The special design of the Lang Larence is quite unique among instruments used for
‘put-and-take’ games. Instead of looking for parallels in Korea, as Stewart Culin did, (47)
one should consider if it could be related to the similar design of Northern European dice
sticks used for games of physical dexterity. It is difficult to say if there was a direct connection
between the Flemish dice stick games and the Yorkshire game; dice stick games
were also known on the British isles, as the example of strac agus cat from Scotland shows.
The names of the Norwegian games kattepinne and katt reveal that they came to the
Bergen area and the Lista area in South West Norway from somewhere on the British
isles. Judging from the close similarities between the Norwegian games and the strac agus
cat from Argyleshire, they could have well come from Scotland. As the game nixepinne is
more or less identical with kattepinne and katt, it may have come from the same area.
However, the name nix referring to the side with the X seems to connect this game with
the Flemish stick game duzend-slaan, in which the same side was called niets, nothing.
It is evident that the South-West Norwegian game abeseditt is closely related to the
Flemish game. Its name probably refers to the four first letters of the alphabet: a, b, c and
d, one letter for each of its four sides.
Exebiti is not an original Faroese game. Its name is borrowed from the words pronounced
by the person who strikes the stick: “Exebite, exaksebiti”, probably Latin: “excipite,
ecce accipite”, meaning “catch, watch (out), grab it!”. The circle or ring is named roti,
again a Latin word. Johan Christian Svabo recounts in 1782 that this game was considered
to have been brought to the Faroe isles by sailors, possibly French.
Cat sticks with Roman numerals, serving as a sort of dice, are not known from
Denmark and apparently not from Northern Scandinavia either; they are only recorded
for the southern and south-western coast of Norway between Oslo and Bergen. Along