SAVE These Ancient 2 Player Board Games From Europe!

Are you looking for some awesome two-player board games that are really portable that you can throw into your luggage or even into your wallet and take overseas on holiday with you? Well, these four games that I'm going to share with you today are all from Europe. In fact, they've been resurrected. They're traditional games that have stood the test of time, and we are here to save them.

Today, I'll be looking at Ludos, the ancient games of Europe collection. There are four games in this box. Doesn't matter which way you turn them around because they all are super fun. Hi, my name's Danny. I'm an advid morning board gamer from Australia. Love sharing my passion for this hobby with you, my friends, and my family.

Come and join me on this journey and don't forget to subscribe for some more wholesome board game content. [music] >> [music] >> The first game I want to talk about comes all the way from Greece. It's a game that um kind of really stretches your mind in terms of engaging your ability to focus on tactical gameplay and making decisions that kind of help you to entrap your opponents.

Now, I've been actually been playing uh chess on my mobile phone with my one of my friends, and I've actually lost 38 games in a row. I've still yet to win a game. But chess kind of has that feeling of like you've got these pieces that kind of move a certain way, and you're trying to entrap your opponent's king.

And this game uh Paya is actually a Greek game that philosophers and the citizens of Greece used to play to test their mental agility, their ability to ent trap and encircle their opponent by making strategic and tactical moves. And so in this game, what's going to happen is one player is going to control the hoplights, which are basically two rows of soldiers and a leader.

And then the opposing play is going to be uh controlling the atrescans and their leader. And throughout the game, you're on your turn, you're going to be able to move any of your pieces in a vertical or horizontal line. Uh provided that there's no obstructions in the way. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to trap your opponent's pieces and wedge them between two of your own.

So, if I've got um my opponent's piece next to my piece and I'm slide a second piece that sandwiches them between two of my pieces, I can remove my opponent's piece from the board. What's really interesting about this game is that you do have a lot of pieces. There's like 24 pieces that you're managing and controlling and maneuvering across the board.

So soldiers are going to be lined up in different orientations and they're going to be pinged and you might consider grouping them or putting them in diagonal formations and that's something that you'll explore throughout the game. But there is an added element of having your leader piece and your leader piece can jump over any number of pieces whether it's yours or your opponents and they can kind of line themsel up into a position that can help you also to remove your opponent's pieces in a strategic way.

You can also remove more than one piece if you flank the pieces. So basically, if you have them like in an L shape or you move a piece and it kind of sandwiches two side pieces amongst uh two other of your pieces, then you can kind of remove two pieces in one go. That kind of requires a little bit more forward thinking and a bit more depth in terms of the positioning that you're going to take in the game.

And what I really like about the game is it's not just about removing the other soldiers. It's about protecting your captain piece and protecting your leader piece and maneuvering your leader piece because if your leader piece gets stuck, then you automatically lose the game. If you lose all your troops, you lose the game.

Or if every one of your pieces becomes immobilized in some way, then you also lose the game. So, there's that element of like trying to move in to have an attack against your opponent, protecting, I guess, your uh captain piece, but then also using that as a special power to your advantage. And the board itself is this big long grid.

So, it kind of has that forward movement of like when you watch movies like, you know, The Mummy or The Mummy Returns and there's that big epic battle scene or Lord of the Rings and you see all those troops lining up on the crest of the hill and they just kind of dash forward. This game kind of has that feeling except it's kind of really condensed down that you can just literally open it out on a park bench, play a couple of games and just really have a lot of fun.

I also want to add that Pate actually means pebbles. So, this game is also kind of traditionally known as the game of pebbles where you could basically play on the side alley where you use lines in the ground or you can draw the grid using sticks in some dirt or some sand and you can actually just go to your local garden, get some pebbles and line them up.

And this is the way a lot of people did play these sorts of games. And it kind of reminds me of like when I go to my local park and I see people playing Chinese chess or I see them playing knots and crosses. It's kind of got that very um flexible way of playing, that approachability of like, oh, I know this game.

Oh, this is a game that I I've I played long ago, and we can just have a quick game and set it up and just really really have a lot of fun with it. I've always been fascinated with Celtic culture. Games like Inish, where you where a lot of the mechanics infuse the idea of uh Celtic folklore and Irish folklore into the mechanics and card play really have captured my interest over time and feature predominantly in my board game collection.

Also, when I was a teenager, one of my favorite pop groups was Bewitched from Ireland, and I still sometimes listen to their music today. Uh, this next game actually comes from Ireland and it was recorded in some of the early Irish manuscripts and it's all about a Viking war band coming by ship and trying to secure a Celtic stronghold.

The game is called brand dub which is a word meaning black raven. In this game, one player plays as the defender. They play as the king where the king piece is going to be in the central square on this grid board. To the north, south, east, and west of this uh king piece are his four little defending knights or his armies.

along those arms of this little plus formation, the attacking player will take on the role of the Vikings and they will kind of be on the outer edges of this arm that kind of is the beginning formation of this game. The aim of the game is for the king to try and get to one of the four corners of this grid.

The four corners are kind of like um very special because only the king can go onto those spaces, but they also have a dual function because in this game, just like in a lot of other abstract games, to get rid of your opponent's pieces, you need to kind of sandwich them between two other places. And so one way to get rid of um an opponent's piece is to sandwich them against one of the four corner squares, which is intriguing to me because it kind of creates this interesting um change to the geographical grid style game that we often see the abstract games adopt.

I also like the fact that the king can only go into those four corners. So all the other troops and other pieces are trying to tactfully avoid those particular spaces because you can only travel vertically or horizontally in the game. Um it's kind of a bit of a cat and mouse style game because the Viking play is trying to trap the king and the king is trying to outmaneuver the Vikings in order to achieve their victory condition.

In the meantime or in the process, the king has also got these four soldier pieces that they're trying to use to kind of block the way and try and outmaneuver or eliminate the Viking plays pieces. The Viking player actually takes control of eight pieces and the Celtic player only controls five pieces.

So already the Celtic player is outnumbered. And this idea of this asymmetry or this cat and mouse uh to and fro of trying to evade but also entrapp the other player really plays true and quite uh thematically in this game considering it's an abstract game at its heart. Now when we often think about abstract games we often picture games that are very uh themeless or there's no real story behind them.

Games like knots and crosses when people think of that or checkers people don't really imagine a story to be behind it. Whereas games more like chess do have a little bit more of that medieval history behind it that kind of gives it a little bit of a thematic touch. This next game has a theme that I've not really seen before and it actually comes from the Sammy people in northern Scandinavia and it's about I guess grazing rights for your herd of deer.

And it's about two competing tribes that are kind of tapping into their traditional cultural practices as well as trying to I guess gain control of this Arctic region. The game I'm talking about is called Saku and it's from Finland. And in this game you kind of have your deer locked away at the top or at the bottom of the board depending which player you are.

And as you roll these dice, which are kind of uh d4s essentially, but they have this really cool little jewel like shape to them, you're going to be unlocking these deer and then moving them along this track. And the track essentially creates a figure 8 formation. If you're at the bottom of the track, you're going to kind of sbend at the top.

And if you're at the top of the track, you're sbending down in the opposite way and eventually kind of get in each other's way because there's three different main rows. Now, in this game, you're not going to be using the spaces. And if you've seen games like Back Gammon, this game kind of gives you that visual um aesthetic of back gammon, but here you're moving on the lines and you're moving on the lines based on your dice uh dice rolls.

And the more deer you can unlock, the higher the chance that you can kind of trap other players deer. Or you could have your deer actually removed from the board because the way you capture another play's D is by landing on the same kind of bone um fragment as them and then removing all of your opponent all the opponent's pieces from that bone fragment from the game.

So if your opponent has like three deer and you roll a one and you move your deer onto that bone fragment, you remove all three of their deer from the game. And basically, you win the game if you either remove all of your opponent's active deer or you remove uh five of them and there are no other active ones that have been released onto the game board.

So, the game kind of incentivizes you to keep pulling out deer and moving them along this track, but also incentivizing you to also try and capture your opponent's de and position your deer on this very kind of cool scalallike board. I kind of describe it as like a rib cage. There's kind of little spokes everywhere and you're kind of moving along the little thread lines.

It's such a intriguingly looking game. Now, there is a central buck that kind of starts at the middle row of the uh board in the beginning of the game. And if you capture that one, you actually flip it over to your side. And that now acts as part of your herd. It just adds this extra thrill into the game that just makes it feel like [snorts] you can actually then oh I could have got this extra piece that I can maneuver that might be able to quickly sweep across that middle row.

And now the middle corridor of this game board is where everyone kind of goes on top of each other and intersects. And that's where a lot of the like piece removal is going to happen. that central wind corridor, I think thematically described, uh, is just such a busy area that as your opponent's moving deer down and you're moving your deer up, they're all going to kind of like get in each other's way.

And so having that um, maneuverability of gaining control of that central buck allows you to kind of do like extra sweeps. If you roll a certain number and you can't really maneuver your other pieces into the right spot, having that piece gives you an extra option in the game. I find Saku quite a fascinating game just because how simple it is, but I just can imagine myself, you know, leading the herd of deer across the snow in the Arctic, bracing that cold weather and just really um thinking about how I'm going to maneuver my herd into position so that I can have maximum impact against my opponent, but also avoid losing a lot of my deer in the process.

About 7 years ago, I actually traveled to Italy with my husband and we had this great adventure where we went to the forum in Rome. We went to the Colosseum. We even went down to Naples to visit Pompei and Herculanium. Um, beautiful experience, rich with history. And on a side note, if you ever choose to decide between Herculanium and Pompei, Hercu Herculanium, wow, it was so quiet and because it's kind of sunken down in this kind of area where it used to be like the coastline of Italy, but when uh Mount Vuvius erupted and was covered in ash, it was kind of trapped and preserved for so long that it wasn't until they built some apartments that they excavated and found this entire city still in pristine condition in this area.

So, if you really want to if you're thinking about going to Naples, definitely stop by Herculanium. I found that to be such an intriguing place to walk around, really quiet, and just to see all the colored tiles so preserved. I really felt like I was walking along the streets there. Um, this next game is all about uh facing off in a with gladiators in an auditorium in the coliseum in fact.

And one player is going to be taking on the role of the bear, a singular piece that's going to start in the center of the coliseum. And the other player is going to take on the role of the three gladiators. At the beginning of the game, there's going to be this little sun token that's going to track the number of turns that uh both players have played.

And if the bear can survive the entire game without being trapped, then the bear player wins. The gladiators win if they can trap the bear. Now, in this game, no pieces are removed. You're basically maneuvering three gladiator pieces or your bear piece around this kind of circular network structure that uh whoever can outmaneuver the other player or encircle them the most effectively is going to win the game.

Bear Hunt has this interesting tactical element to it. You're guided by the lines on the circuit. And I believe that the one I'm showing you in this video, uh there's actually part of it missing. So the final uh copy of the game will have uh that final connection. And there's also variant to the game where the bear player has four coins which uh you can flip over to give you or the bear play certain powers like pushing the opponent's gladiators away, swapping positions.

Uh, so there's a few extra ways that the game can change, but here you're just thinking about, well, if you're the gladiator, how are you going to move your three pieces to slowly entrap the bear player? If you're the bear player, you're often looking for little gaps and opportunities to escape and run away and get out of a situation where you feel like you're being encircled.

And if you ever watch, you know, Gladiator or Spartacus and you see those like uh, you know, warriors kind of just evade uh, their attackers and they try and find their position. This game kind of emulates that tactical nature of maneuvering yourself into the right place at the right time. And so the bear simply just has to outrun the gladiator player for 40 turns.

And if they can do that, they've essentially gone, "Huh, I've outsmarted you. You've got three pieces, I've got one, and I've been able to get away. But that element of a cat and mouse, that tugofwar of like feeling like the Roman Empire or the gladiators are closing in on you really emanates quite thematically in this very small condensed game.

So, what did you think of the Ludos collection, the games of Europe? If you found these four games super intriguing, please feel free to check out the other four games from this uh collection, The Games of Asia, Games of America, and Games of Africa, which have all been resurrected uh with beautiful care and touch and empathy for the history of the game itself.

Now, if you found this video super helpful, please consider subscribing to my channel and liking this video and sharing this video with your friends and family. Otherwise, this is Danny Sia. I hope your next board gaming experience is an amazing one. See you soon. Goodbye.