Mary Rose Gaming Barrel Lid

Source

Mary Rose Museum material and historical-game scholarship around tables games, Daldos, Sahkku, and related boards.

Question

What does carving games into an oak barrel lid reveal about tools, time, boredom, and shipboard making?

Materials

• Oak barrel lid
• Scaled scans of the game boards
• Replica bollock dagger
• Marking tools

Method

• Scaled the museum scan to actual size.
• Transferred key points onto the barrel lid.
• Freehanded lines between transferred points.
• Carved the boards into oak with a replica bollock dagger.

Observations

• Oak is stubborn.
• Carving across the grain required repeated sharpening and patience.
• The work made the practical difficulty of shipboard carving more obvious.

Result

• The finished reconstruction closely mirrored the original design and made the labor of the original artifact easier to appreciate.

Uncertainty

• The exact rules of the second board remain debated.
• The sourced barrel wood may not match the moisture or working properties of the Tudor original.

References

• Mary Rose Trust. The Mary Rose Museum Collection.
• Gardiner, Julie, ed. Before the Mast.
• Board Game Studies, Vol. 4.
• Sim, Alison. Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England.

Next

• Play-test candidate rules for the second board and document the reasoning.

Related Projects