tabletop time machine
When you think of games, you don’t automatically think of the materials they are made of. Yet materials technology has often been a driving force in the development and evolution of games. One of the reasons why Germany has become the leading nation in European games culture is the fact that it has long been a forested country, as a cursory reading of Grimms’ Fairy Tales will quickly attest. It therefore has a centuries-old tradition of wooden toy-making, from which the production of wooden gaming equipment in the 19th century was a logical step. Similarly, the development and expansion in that century of lithographic printing readily accounts for the fact that many game companies started as stationery manufacturers and book publishers.