Games have been played for thousands of years and are common【A1】______ all cultures. Throughout history and【A2】______ the world people have used sticks to draw simple game boards on the ground,【A3】______ up rules that incorporate stones or other common objects【A4】______ playing pieces. About 5, 000 years ago people began to make more permanent game boards from sun-dried mud or wood.

Some of the oldest board games may have evolved from methods of fortune-telling. The game of go, which many experts regard as the finest example of a pure strategy game, may have evolved from a method of fortune-telling practiced in China more than three thousand years ago, 【A5】______ black and white pieces were cast onto a square board marked with symbols of various significance. Go also involves black and white pieces on a board, but players deliberately place them on intersections of lines while trying to【A6】______ more territory than opponent.

Chess, Xiangqi (Chinese chess) and Shogi (Japanese chess) are【A7】______ the most widely played board games in the world.【A8】______ quite different, all three are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor — either a 6th-century game played in India or an earlier game played in China.【A9】______ the centuries, chess【A10】______ westward to the Middle East and【A11】______ Europe, with rules【A12】______ frequently. The game also spread【A13】______ to Korea and Japan,【A14】______ in very different rules changes.

For most of human history, a game could not【A15】______ much popularity unless it was【A16】______  easy for players to make their own equipment. The【A17】______ of printing (which occurred in the mid-1400s in the West) made this process easier, but it was【A18】______ the advance of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution that it became possible to mass-produce many new【A19】______ of games. Twentieth-century technological advances such as the invention of plastic and the computer revolution led to the creation of more games, and more new kinds of games, than in all previous centuries【A20】______ .