Kakeba Board Game

by j4p4n - uploaded on January 20, 2023, 3:50 pm

This one fascinates me! In 1889 (thus public domain) the famous board game company Milton Bradley sold this as "Kakeba - The Japanese Backgammon game" but Japan already had a very old (and very different than this) original variant on backgammon called "Ban-sugoroku" (not played so much anymore, most people prefer modern backgammon these days I guess) so I wonder if this really was a contemporary Japanese variant or one that was sold as "Japanese" to make it seem special or something. Case in point, the game known as "Chinese checkers" in America was actually a German game (called Sternhalma) given the name "Chinese checkers" as a marketing gimmick.