Most board games are positional. That is, play centres on moving pieces around them. But there’s another class of board games that I call stake board games. These are mostly dice games in which the board illustrates the winning outcomes of possible rolls of dice and states the odds against and payoff-offs for achieving them. They’re essentially gambling games and would be pointless if not played for money.
Crown & Anchor is one such. As the name implies, it’s a popular game of the British navy, both Royal and merchant, as well as in the Australian, and is widely played in the Channel Islands and Bermuda. Substantially similar games are known throughout the maritime world. They have the practical advantage of requiring no more equipment than several dice and a simple layout typically marked on a board or piece of oilcloth for lightness and portability - as suggested by Crown & Anchor’s earlier name ‘Sweatcloth’. It’s divided into six staking compartments marked with a spade, a club, a heart, a diamond, a crown, and an anchor, these last two being the insignia of the Royal Navy.
Punters stake on any of the compartments and the banker casts three such dice from a cup. The stake on a given symbol wins at even money if it turns up on one die, at 2 to 1 on two, and at 3 to 1 on all three dice. Despite the banker’s more than generous edge of 8 per cent, the game remains popular largely because the odds appear deceptively favourable in the eyes of an unsophisticated punter. Something like it reached America towards the end of the eighteenth century and subsequently became the casino and carnival game known as Chuck-a-Luck, or Bird-Cage. It was said of Wild Bill Hickock and his like that they loved the game ‘probably because they never had enough upstairs to figure the odds against them’.