If there’s one thing to take away from the ‘Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered’ exhibition is that playing board games is a serious business, writes Clare Walters.

Stories exist of kingdoms being lost over a dice game. There have even been instances of people wagering limbs on the result of a game of chess. And negative associations with gambling have resulted in dice themselves being shunned. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries children were encouraged to use ‘teetotums’ – spinning tops with several sides decorated with numbers or letters – instead of dice.