Facsimile

• Primero from Nare's Glossary -- Facsimile provided by Imran Ghory -- well post-period, but still interesting. (more)
• The Silliman Etching -- A 1665 etching of children at play, hosted and annotated by Faire Tyme Toys. (more)
• The Playe of Chess -- Relatively high-resolution images at Digital Bodleian, from Caxton's English translation of De ludo scachorum. One of the first books published in English! Not actually very useful from a rules POV, though: this is mostly moral philosophy, using Chess and its pieces as a metaphor. (more)
• On the Explanation of Chess and Backgammon -- A medieval Persian source, describing how Chess came to Persia and how "backgammon" (games within the Tables) was invented. (more)
• Images of many board games (heavy on Goose) -- A substantial number of game boards, many (but not all) period and many (but not all) of them Goose variations (more)
• Vat.lat.5854 -- An apparently-anonymous (?), but large and interesting manuscript, full of what appear to be chess problems. The hand isn't the easiest to read, but appears to be Latin, and there is a lot of it. (more)
• Historical playing cards -- A collection of images of historical playing cards. Many of these are from uncut sheets of woodblock printed cards. (more)
• Repetición de amores y Arte de ajedrez -- Online facsimile of a 1497 Spanish book on Chess (more)
• Facsimile images of Jacobus de Cessolis' MS -- A Latin text that uses Chess as a metaphor for the various roles of human life. Later translated into English and published by Caxton: Chess -- Caxton's "The Game and Playe of the Chesse" (more)
• The Web Gallery of Art -- A useful virtual museum with a lot of period artworks. (more)
• Chess Problems in the NYPL -- Half a dozen scanned pages from the New York Public Library's collection, showing chess problems, apparently from 14th c. Italy. (more)
• The Compleat Gamester, 1725 edition -- A facsimile of a later (but still useful) edition of Cotton, available on Google Books. (more)
• Academie Universelle des Jeux (1718) -- An out-of-period but still very interesting edition of one of the earliest serious encyclopedias of games. (French) (more)
• MS page showing Nine Men's Morris -- The illustration is in the lower border, and is a bit small, but it is unambiguously showing two people playing Merels. (more)
• Images from the Alphonso MS -- Organized by Charles Knutson of MacGregor Historic Games, this site collects (admittedly somewhat low-res) images of much of Alphonso X's Book of Games. (more)
• Scan of Liber de Ludo Aleae -- This is Cardano's book, the standard source of Primero information. (more)
• Benedetto's *Trattato Delle Proportioni Et Proportionalita* -- A 16th century MS describing the Rithmimachia Pytagorae -- Rhythmomachy. (more)
• Description at The History of Chess -- Goes into more detail about this game than most sites. (more)
• Tractatus de scacchis, de tabulis et de merellis -- Online facsimile of an early 15th century book on Chess, Tables and Merels, containing bazillions of puzzles. Extremely neat! (more)