The Evolution of RPGs: Nine Men's Morris
I wasn't sure how to try to fit the "alignment" subgenre into my evolutionary tree. These are games like Tic-Tac-Toe or Nine Men's Morris, and I find it very compelling to suggest that they were actually the first pure strategy games, largely because they're so simple (even average humans can completely solve the smaller ones). It stands to reason that they'd be an early prototype that then evolved into something like Petteia (in the same way that Senet may have evolved from Mehen) as players demanded something more complex. Also, alignment games are another essential human genre, with examples from disparate and disconnected cultures around the world. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence doesn't cooperate. It's true that there are some surfaces as old as 1400 BCE that have alignment game scratches in them – but why should graffiti scratches be just as old as the surface they're scratched into? As it stands, records that attest to the play of these games don't appear until over a thousand years later, which suggests the earliest alignment games were created long after Petteia and Go. I wasn't able to dig up a satisfying answer on this one, so you know anything more about it, please send me a message!
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