About This Series
Asia is home to some of best known and longest surviving board games in the world. Backgammon originated in West Asia, Chess in South Asia, and Go in East Asia. The list goes on and can be expanded to include hundreds, if not thousands, of games that most people have never even heard of. Yet the history of their transmission, translocation, and transcreation across the Asian continent remains little explored and poorly understood. This owes in part to obvious barriers of culture and language, but also to a lack of communication between board game scholars. Even a cursory glance at the sources—whether textual, visual, material, or ethnographic—shows that they speak a common language that we as researchers do not.
The 2025 ASTRA colloquium series, entitled "The Ludic Languages of Asia: Sources and Terminologies", brings together board game scholars working with primary sources in a variety of Asian languages. It asks them to present their sources and discuss questions of context, structure, content, and language use. The goal is not only to establish connections between specific games and game cultures, but also between researchers and methodologies. The series is rooted in a larger project to build a database of ludic terminologies across linguistic glossaries in Asia. A special keynote lecture on games and language will be delivered by Alex de Voogt who has been instrumental in shaping the modern landscape of board game studies.
Contact and Registration
We welcome both internal and external guests. Registration is only required for physical attendance. For further information about the colloquium series, please contact Jacob Schmidt-Madsen.
