Some works of literature include well-known games, while others invent their own
Games have a long literary history. Chaucer writes about “tables,” a forerunner of backgammon, in The Canterbury Tales (1387). Backgammon appears again in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-96), as does chess in his later play The Tempest (1610- 11). Alexander Pope dramatises the Spanish trick-taking game Ombre in his mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712). Helen Huntingdon and Walter Hargrave’s game of chess, a tense match between two “keen gamesters,” is one of the most memorable scenes in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). In the 20th century, T. S. Eliot reprises the title of Thomas Middleton’s satirical play A Game of Chess (1624) as the title of the second section of his great poem The Waste Land (1922) where, once again, games offer a way of conceptualising love, lust and power. In these examples games rarely feature as subjects in and off themselves, rather acting as metaphors for Machiavellian game-playing, conflict and status.
In more recent years board and card games have featured in a wide range of fictions including Philip K. Dick’s The Game-Players of Titan (1963), Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji (1981), Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games (1988), Louise Wener’s The Big Blind (2003),