The Game of the Goose
The Game of the Goose (or, as I like to call it, Titled Goose Game) is possibly the first commercial board game of all time. For two pence (about $3 nowadays), you could head down to your local print shop and get a copy made from a big printing plate they have sitting in the corner of the room. Provide your own dice and player tokens (find a unique rock or something) and you got yourself a game! It’s kind of a Chutes and Ladders type: totally luck-based with huge momentum shifts, great for kids or gamblers, and the best part… it’s now on Playdate.
Interestingly, this isn’t even the first very old board game on Playdate. The Royal Game of Ur from ancient Mesopotamia also has a Playdate port, and I somehow had a wooden version of this in the house growing up. How? I don’t know; sometimes families just have things. But The Game of the Goose was new for me.
Up to eight players, pass-and-play style, roll two dice on their turn and move around the track. The goal is to land on the final, 63rd space with an exact roll. There are lots of spaces that move you around in different ways to keep things interesting. The Lucky Goose that sits every nine spaces lets you double your roll, and there’s a lose-a-turn Hotel space, and a stay-there-until-someone-releases-you Prison space, and a Death space (not a physical death, but more of a “death of the soul” a.k.a. go back to the beginning). A lot of these wacky spaces are near the end, and when you don’t get an exact roll to win, you’ll go backwards the number of spaces you rolled! Land on a Lucky Goose in this manner and it becomes an Unlucky Goose, doubling your backwards movement, maybe right onto the Death space. Because of this, people can enter the game at any time, and even if your opponent is near the end and you’re at the beginning, there’s no sure bet on who will win. There are also special rules on where you get to move if you roll a 9 on the first roll, because the Lucky Geese would otherwise push you right to the finish. This isn’t Blackjack; you can’t just win right away!
The board depicted here is the oldest surviving English board, from 1670. And the dice roll (which can be done by shaking the Playdate and I highly recommend!) has some very well-recorded Foley effects. There’s no background music, though, and it feels like we should get some public-domain lutes in here or something.
The randomness of the game makes it perfect for when you’re all sitting around drinking wine and passing the Playdate back and forth, and there aren’t a lot of 8-player Playdate games, especially ones where you get to shake the system to roll the dice. And it’d be fun to explain the history of the game to your friends, too, so at least read the Wikipedia before you show up with your box of wine and explain that no, you didn’t bring a piece of cheese to show them – it’s called a Playdate and it has board games on it. The party has arrived and it is a silly goose.
(Released August 13, 2024, on Catalog. Learn more about the game’s development on Cohost, while it exists. Copy provided by developer.)