As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America, I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States.”
This forgotten game, printed the year after Missouri became a state, has a lot to say about America’s nascent board game industry, as well as how a young country saw itself.
An archival find
Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States” was an imitation of earlier European geography games, a genre of educational game. Geography games generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they race toward the finish.
“The Travellers’ Tour” first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S.
But for almost a century another game held that honor.
In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to “The Mansion of Happiness,” an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it “The first board game ever published in America.”
That distinction ended in 1991 when a game collector found the copy of “The Travellers’ Tour” in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society.
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