About us
Played has always been,
so let's keep this tradition
We are Dor
it Grunewald - Schmidt and Steffen Schmidt.
During her studies Dorit got to know a game, which was played in the north of Europe and also in our regions from the age of 4. On his trip to Lapland Carl von Liné saw this game and wrote down the rules. This way the wonderful game could be preserved. This game "Hnefatafl" was the first one Dorit made for herself. It was given away, the next one was made and given away again. At some point the idea arose to offer this "Hnefatafl" to a larger circle of interested people. So several of them were made. To open a business with only one game? That is not possible. So other historical board games were added. So followed the mill known to us, the chess game and a game of the ancient Egyptians, the Senet game, which was played as early as 2700 BC. This game was found in Tutankhamun's tomb as a burial gift in different versions. So we can now offer about 30 games from many times and countries.
In 2008 Steffen became aware of the business and now turned his hobby into his profession. When Dorit finished her studies with a diploma in 2013 she retired from the business to turn to her passion, biology. Since then, Steffen has been taking care of the business.
Apart from games brought to the market by player finders, every game has a story. Some people enjoy playing games like mill, backgammon, chess or checkers on social evenings; but, do we know where these games come from or where they originate from? Every one of us knows the game of checkers, but where does it come from? Likewise, the beautiful social game "Mensch ärgere dich nicht" - did you know that it probably comes from an Indian game? This is the reason why we want to bring the history of games closer to our audience. Often the rules of these historical games are very simple to explain and to understand, this is due to the fact that at that time very few people could read and write. Since people didn't want to spend hours talking about a game, but rather dare to play it, the rules were short - in contrast to modern games, where you often have to look up in a rule book after each move, what can or may I do. Some people might think, "well, no difficult rules, then no high strategy". Here it is just the other way around, without a difficult rulebook you can concentrate all the more on tactics, like in our personal "game of the year" - Hnefatafl. Also to know that there was already e.g. 2700 B.C. in Egypt with the Senet an interesting possibility of the pastime, or before approx. 3800 years in Mesopotamia the Pah Tum and so on.
If you want to find out which games were played when and where, or if you want to try and play them yourself, you have come to the right place.