Game of the Goose

The Game of the Goose, sometimes called the Royal Game of the Goose, is a race game played on a spiral track of 63 numbered spaces, where two or more players roll dice and move a goose-shaped token toward the final space, needing to land on it exactly to win. Along the way the spiral passes symbolic hazard spaces, including a bridge, a hotel and a death space that can send a player back to the start or force a turn to be skipped, while landing on one of thirteen goose spaces lets a player move again. Believed to have originated in Italy during the fifteenth century, the game was famously given as a gift by Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici of Tuscany to King Philip II of Spain in the late sixteenth century, and it is regarded as one of the earliest board games to be manufactured and sold commercially, later inspiring countless themed and educational spiral race games across Europe and America.