where were some of the first board games invented

Some of the very first board games were invented in ancient parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, especially in what are now Egypt, Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), and nearby regions.

Ancient birthplaces

• Ancient Egypt : One of the earliest known board games, Senet , comes from Predynastic and early dynastic Egypt, with game boards found in tombs dating to around 3500–3100 BCE. Egyptians also played other early games such as “Hounds and Jackals” a bit later in the Middle Kingdom period.

• Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) : The Royal Game of Ur , discovered in royal tombs at the city of Ur and dating to around 2600–2400 BCE, is often cited as the oldest playable board game, because its rules were found on a later cuneiform tablet.

Wider early regions

• Ancient Near East / Southwest Turkey : Some of the oldest gaming pieces ever found—small carved stones from about 5000 years ago—come from a burial mound at Başur Höyük in southeast Turkey, suggesting very early board play in this wider region.

• Levant and surrounding areas : Archaeologists have identified stone boards with holes and lines, dated as early as the 7th–8th millennia BCE in parts of the Near East, which may have been used for very simple board-like games.

Early later traditions

• Indian subcontinent : Traditional games like early forms of carrom and other race or counting games are associated with India, though firm dates are much later than Egypt or Mesopotamia and often rely on later textual or oral traditions rather than very early archaeological boards.

• Northeast Africa (Ethiopia/Eritrea) : Some of the earliest physical traces of mancala -style games come from Aksumite sites in Ethiopia and Eritrea, dating to around the 6th–7th centuries CE, showing that board-gaming traditions spread and evolved far beyond their original birthplaces.

TL;DR : When people ask “where were some of the first board games invented,” the strongest evidence points to early civilizations in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia (Iraq), the broader ancient Near East including southeast Turkey, and later the Indian subcontinent and northeast Africa as key cradles of early board-game history.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.