tabletop time machine
This ancient Chinese game remains somewhat of a mystery, as almost everything is known about it except how it was played. Many ancient texts purport to provide rulesets, but they’re not as clear as modern players are used to nor all entirely consistent with one another. Nor is it even beyond dispute whether it was a race game or a war game, or, more probably, a mixture of both. Nevertheless, Liubo is of great historical interest for the fact that it seems to have been popular with all classes of society for a period of some 500 years. It first appeared in the early Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) and disappeared virtually overnight some time in the third century CE, possibly supplanted by Wei-qi (Go).