Classic Victorian Games

The Victorians have a reputation of being uptight and fairly serious, but they did play. Many of the classic Victorian games and toys I will showcase in this article will probably be familiar to you. In addition to highlighting some classic Victorian games for sale on amazon I have hunted down plans for a variety of the games so you can make them yourself at home.

Many Victorian games are classics that are still common today and make great toys and games for children and adults alike. Many of the games and toys listed in this article are a lot of fun, and I have personally played with each type.

Shut the box is a dice based math game. You start with numbers 1-9 (10,11, and 12 varients exist) showing, you roll two dice and the total of your roll is the number you turn over. If you roll a 3 you can turn over 1 and 2 or 3, and so on. You continue rolling until your dice roll does not add up to the remaining tiles or until you turn over all the tiles.You score by adding up all the remaining tiles you have left, if you turn over all the tiles you have "shut the box" and score zero. Traditionally shut the box was a tavern gambling game.

This is a classic British pub game. A ball on a string is swung and how many skittles are knocked over depends on your score. This game is related to modern 10 and 5 pin bowling as well as lawn bowling. Skittles is the common name for bowling pins and this is just a shrunken version of bowling with the ball attached to a string. In Victorian England pubs often had a wide variety of games, some even had a skittles alley for playing an ancestor to modern bowling, this game is the direct ancestor of both bowling and Devil amongst the Tailors.

Top Tafl, or table skittles actually go by many names, in short its bowling using a top instead of a ball. It's a lot of fun, requires more luck than skill. This game has a maze of sorts with various skittles (pins) set up at key points. The object is to spin the top and let the top fly through the maze knocking over as many skittles as possible, each skittle is assigned a number of points based on the likely hood of top reaching those pins. Highest score wins.

This is more a toy than a game, but it has always been a personal favourite, I remember playing with a jacob's ladder just like this as a kid. I was fascinated with the concept. I don't think I could even begin to guess how many hours I spent playing with this trying to figure out how it worked. I never did figure it out as a kid, but having done research into games I have seen plans and now understand the mystery that is Jacob's Ladder.

Cup and ball is a classic toy. A real hand eye coordination skill tester. Most people don't believe it, since I have two left feet and am incredibly clumsy, but I am great at this game.

The Rocking Horse dates back to the middle ages, but for the most part early versions were not really considered toys but practice tools for jousting. In the Victorian era the idea of a rocking horse as children's toys really took off. They became an incredibly popular toy, and pretty much every household (that could afford one) had one.

Being as the rocking horse was wood with no moving parts one would assume they would be quite in-expensive, but the intricacy of the designs meant specialized skills and hundreds if not thousands of hours of manual labour to create one. Rocking horses have always been fairly expensive.