![]() Like senjafuda, sugoroku boards have not attracted the same kind of attention from scholars and collectors that their ukiyo-e cousins have one of the few discussions of them in English is in Rebecca Salter’s Japanese Popular Prints (pp. In fact, many of the boards seem to have been designed not for actual play but for appreciation as visual art that incorporates gameplay ideas and forms into its visual scheme-rather like later senjafuda, meant not for pasting but for exchange and appreciation. These were illustrated, printed, and sold by some of the same artists and craftsmen responsible for ukiyo, illustrated books, and, yes, senjafuda.Īs games sugoroku boards have little to offer modern players, but as works of visual art they can often be quite spectacular. The rules for the latter were simple, but the “boards” themselves came in a dizzying variety of arrangements, and were not in fact boards but paper on which pictorial designs were printed. The word also came to refer to board games similar to the snakes-and-ladders type or simple race-type games familiar today. The word first applied to the game known in English as backgammon, which is played with a pair of dice (thus the name). Sugoroku-which may literally be translated as “double sixes”-is the name for two not-really-related kinds of board games played in premodern Japan. ![]() Here we digress from senjafuda to look at another kind of woodblock-printed yōkai from the mid-19th century: a sugoroku gameboard. ![]()
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