ABSTRACT
Sports and card games are, as Huizinga (1949) observed, very old. The Olympics began in 776 BC and the festival must have built on even older traditions of competitive races and throwing contests. The pack of cards we use now in the west dates back to medieval times. Koreans played card games before the Greeks and the Romans were addicted to all kinds of games. Did Cro-Magnon persons develop a form of Monopoly based on which cave was worth more than another? Probably. In a nice phrase, Sutton-Smith (1983) has written of a human instinct ‘to game’.
