Daldøs

Daldøs is a two-player running-fight board game historically found only in a small number of coastal areas of southern Scandinavia, with documented references reaching back to around 1800. The game is played with unusually shaped four-sided dice rather than the standard six-sided cubes used in most dice games, and pieces race and fight along a track in a style comparable to other race-and-capture board games. In Denmark it survived in northern and western Jutland, including the areas of Mors, Thisted and the island of Fanø, while in Norway a closely related form called daldøsa was played in the Jæren district, where the tradition has continued into more recent times after dying out elsewhere by the early twentieth century. Researchers have noted that Daldøs shares clear similarities with the sáhkku family of board games played by the Sámi people, and with tâb games found across North Africa and South-West Asia, and have even connected it to a game diagram found in an English manuscript from around 1250 to 1300, suggesting a long and widespread lineage for this style of dice race game.