The Board Game Studies 2019 in Bologna

The Italian legacy in the field of gaming culture and game studies is vast. Many of our local and traditional games have their roots in the distant past, having been played for centuries with a limited degree of variation. Even before the Roman era, history had left its mark in our gaming culture, preserving and innovating, as well as erasing, existing gaming practices.

The current configuration of Italian gaming traditions is the result of a long process of evolution, stratification, exchange and contamination. The annual Board Game Studies Colloquium provides a forum for scholars from many different countries. One of the aims of this year’s event is to present Italy’s ludic heritage to the international Board Game Studies association whilst also facilitating access for Italian game scholars to the Board Game Studies network and its knowledge community.

The annual Board Game Studies colloquium is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars from many different fields and disciplines. This convergence allows game studies to be approached from multiple points of view: the research findings and knowledge disseminated in past colloquia have embraced archaeological evidence, cross-cultural connections, mathematical, psychological and social implications of past and present gaming practices. This year, as we reconvene and invite participants in the broad, multi-disciplinary, Board Game Studies community to assemble in Italy, we are giving a particular focus to educational aspects of board games. Our venue, the University Alma Mater of Bologna, with its pre-eminent role in Italian academia as a leading research centre, as well as having the distinction of being the oldest university in Europe, is an eminently suitable location for the Twenty Second Board Game Studies Colloquium.

We invite delegates to celebrate once more the human inclination to play and to partake of our diversity in implementing and understanding it.

The Organizers

A warm salutation by Niek Neuwahl

Organizer of the first BGS Colloquium in Italy

I'm happy, very happy, and I'm not so happy.

I'm happy, very happy, that now in 2019, after the Colloquium I had the pleasure to organise in Florence in 1999, the BGS-Colloquium takes place for the second time in Italy.

I'm happy, very happy, that my proposal made in Leiden after the second Colloquium, to try to organize every two years another place to meet, has been successful. I think that also for that reason the Colloquiums gained in variation and therefore in interest – in fact, the colloquiums are now every year and not, as in the beginning, every two years.

I'm happy, very happy, that the opening speech in Florence, 1999, was held by the unforgotten maestro of the games inventors, Alex Randolph – widening in this best of all possible ways the circle of partecipants also to the world of games inventors and the world of nowadays games production.

I'm not so happy that the results of an awkward eye-operation, undergone in 2017, limit my activity and make it impossible for me to attend the Colloquium in Bologna.

But I'm happy, very happy, to send my greetings to all my friends and to wish you all a wonderful 2019-Bologna-BGS-Colloquium!

Niek Neuwahl

Salutation of Pr. Ivo Mattozzi

President at Clio '92 - italian association of history teachers

Dear attendees of the XXII BGS colloquium,
because of the success of the event, the quality of the papers and the following discussions, and for the pleasure of sharing the beauty of Bologna, as president of Clio ' 92 I feel lucky and happy.

I apologize with you for not having attended all the sessions. I missed the opportunity to learn so much in terms of knowledge, ideas, and methods to use games as educational tools. But above all, I regret for not having played with you at the Tarocchino. I would have had a lot of fun, because board games, city games, card games have played a great role in my childhood and in a great part of my life.

I hope to read soon your papers in the proceedings, and also in Italian, so that the teachers of Clio'92 could study on them. The community of Clio '92 is proud to have contributied to a such extraordinary and successful event as the BGS Colloquium. I wish all of you to enjoyed the beauties of Italy and had a good and safe trip.

With so much gratitude and friendship,

Ivo Mattozzi

Materials

Rules of the Tarocchino Bolognese

The most peculiar legacy of Bologna in the field of Games.

Program & Booklet of Abstract

All the topics which has been discussed during the conference.