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In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. Senet is one of the earliest known board games. Archaeological and artistic evidence suggest it was played as early as 3100 B.C.,...

A medieval gaming board has been found by archaeologists working to find a lost Pictish-era monastery in Aberdeenshire. Archaeologist Ali Cameron said the board found near Old Deer was a "very rare" find with it used to play the Norse strategy game of Hnefatafl. A date for the board has yet to be established but a similar piece found in Birsay, Orkney, in 1989 was dated to the Late Iron Age/Pictish period from the 5th to 9th Century AD. Ms Cameron said: "It is a very rare object and only a few have been found in Scotland, mainly on monastic...

One of the most significant discoveries of this year's dig is conclusive evidence that the earliest viking houses, thought to date from around AD900, were preceded by a Pictish settlement. Previously -- excavations were carried out in 2008 and 2009 -- a number of Pictish artefacts had been found on the site, but there was no actual proof that the Picts lived there... One question that has yet to be answered though, is what happened in the transition between the Pict and the viking villages, and, as yet, no evidence has been found of an integration between the two. "In...

WikiLeaks has released an email exchange between employees of Stratfor, the US-based global intelligence company, which reveals Israel and Russia made a deal to swap access codes for defense and surveillance equipment. According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the "data link codes" for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran. In a document by a Stratfor employee dated February 2009 she says that she had met with a "Mexican source/friend" who told her that Israel and Russia had...