Liubo
Liubo Board Replica
Alternate Names
Liù bó or Liupo. The name translates to "six sticks".
No. of Players
Two
Equipment
The general pattern shown of Liubo boards is common throughout Chinese archaeology. The pattern has been found carved or etched onto stone, wood, lacquered wood, pottery, or bronze; all places where it was likely intended to be played on as a game. Some of the board relics are complete with table legs. The Liubo pattern, however, also appears on other objects, such as mirrors, coins, sundials and divination boards where its purpose may have been decorative or ritual. The coins may have been akin to good luck charms rather than currency and they, as well as the divination boards, are too small to accommodate game play. There is some variation in the pattern of various Liubo boards found in different places and from different times, but overall, the pattern is always recognizable. For example, some boards are more ornate than others with artistic designs and some boards will have a diagonal line connecting the boxes at the corners to the corner of the square at the center.
Typically, twelve or six half-cylinder split bamboo rods or sticks were used for dice, but some relics had cubical six-sided dice or an unusual eighteen-sided die accompanying them. It is usually taken to be understood that only six sticks were thrown by a player on a turn, but each player had set of stick dice used only by them in the sets with twelve sticks. The cubical and eighteen-sided dice were likely used for other games and just stored with the Liubo set.
The two players require six each distinctive counters to play. Surviving historical counters were often cubical or cuboid and made of ivory, crystal, or jadeite. Six black and six white playing counters are common, but at least one set has the two opposing counters differentiated by having an engraving of a dragon on one set of pieces and an engraving of a tiger on the others. Sets of thirty rod-shaped counting chips, possibly used to keep score, have also been found in association with Liubo sets.
History
Legend credits the invention of Liubo to a minister named Wu Cao (Wu Zhou) c. 1700 BCE. Evidence for its existence at this time is scant at best, but it is known to have been a popular game during the Warring States Period of ancient China, 475 – 403 BCE, when it is mentioned in the historical records and poetry. Archaeological finds and historical references indicate that Liubo enjoyed its greatest popularity during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) of China. A great many boards, gaming pieces, and artistic renditions of the game being played are found from this time period. Its popularity rapidly waned after this and it eventually became completely forgotten, possibly due to the rise of the game of Go. There are a few references to Liubo being played in Tibet, India, and Mongolia, but it seems as if the game was almost purely Chinese and had little dispersion outside of the newly unified country.
Liubo figures prominently in the various legends, poetry, and philosophical texts of ancient China spanning nearly a thousand years. The famous philosopher Confucius did not approve of the playing of Liubo due to its connection to bad gambling habits and decreed that the playing of it was only superior to being idle.
Objective
The fact that Liubo was played with dice probably indicates that it was, at least in part, a race game, possibly with an objective to move all of one’s counters to a finishing location at some location on the board. It is also likely that Liubo combined elements of race games with those of War Games such as Chess.
Play
The exact method or methods of play have been lost to history but recent years have seen several clues arise in archaeological finds that are giving more information towards a valid reconstruction. For now, games historians are only continuing to hope that a more complete set of rules will eventually be discovered in a surviving ancient Chinese manuscript. Some of the few surviving accounts of the game’s play are contradictory, indicating that the game may have had many variations as was typical for most ancient folk games. The most complete description of the rules of Liubo occurs in a quotation from the lost Book of Ancient Bo in a commentary by Zhang Zhan to the Book of Liezi that was written during the Jin Dynasty (265–420):
Method of play: Two people sit facing each other over a board, and the board is divided into twelve paths, with two ends, and an area called the "water" in the middle. Twelve game pieces are used, which according to the ancient rules are six white and six black. There are also two "fish" pieces, which are placed in the water. The throwing of the dice is done with a jade. The two players take turns to throw the dice and move their pieces. When a piece has been moved to a certain place it is stood up on end, and called an "owl". Thereupon it can enter the water and eat a fish, which is also called "pulling a fish". Every time a player pulls a fish he gets two tokens, and if he pulls two fish in a row he gets three tokens [for the second fish]. If a player has already pulled two fish but does not win it is called double-pulling a pair of fish. When one player wins six tokens the game is won.
There have been several attempts to reconstruct the rules of the game, most notably by Lien-sheng Yang, who discusses the game as it was possibly played on TLV mirrors. Yang theorizes that a player’s counter would start on an L-shaped mark and try to move to a V-shaped corner mark as determined by the throwing of sticks. Certain throws would allow a player's counter to move into the center and ‘kill’ the opponent’s piece if it was already there. Once in the center, a piece could begin to block the enemy’s pieces from taking a square. For each block one would gain two points. One could also attempt to recover one’s pieces after they are blocked, and would gain three points for doing this. If one failed to win after having blocked two men, then the opponent would gain six points and win the game. The first player to six points would win the game.
Variations
It is likely that Liubo had many variations per par with most folk games. One known variant of Liubo was called Chupu or Wumu.
A Chinese scholar named Yan Zhitui (531- 591 CE) mentions Liubo in literature in his Yanshi jiaxun ("The Family Instructions of Master Yan"). He states that there were two variants of Libuo, "Greater Bo" which was played with six throwing sticks, and "Lesser Bo" which was played with two dice.
Sources
Parlett, David. The Oxford History of Board Games. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999