Facsimile

• Academie Universelle des Jeux (1758) -- An out-of-period but still very interesting edition of one of the earliest serious encyclopedias of games. (French) (more)
• Benedetto Varchi's Trattato delle proportioni et proportionalita -- A MS dated 1539 describing the Rithmomachia Pytagorae -- Rhythmomachy. (more)
• Chess Problems in the NYPL -- Half a dozen scanned pages in Latin from the New York Public Library's collection, showing chess problems, apparently from 15th c. Italy. (more)
• de vetula, the 13th century d&d poem -- Blog page about rolling dice and the probability of outcomes in De Vetula (more)
• Description of Tamerlane Chess at The History of Chess site -- Goes into more detail about this game than most sites. (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" (1476) (more)
• Historical playing cards -- A collection of images of historical playing cards. Many of these are from uncut sheets of woodblock printed cards. (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)
• 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)
• Liber de Ludo Aleae (Book on Games of Chance) -- Gerolamo Cardano's work, Liber de Ludo Aleae, discusses the mathematical principles of card and dice games. The book was published in 1663, well after Cardano's death in 1576. (more)
• MS page showing Nine Men's Morris -- The illustration is in the lower border. It is shows two people playing Merels. (more)
• Mühle (‘Nine Men’s Morris’) -- A board for a game of Mühle (‘Nine Men’s Morris’) is carved into the inside front cover of a 12th c German Psalter. (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. Downloadable free pdf. (more)
• Primero from Nare's Glossary -- Facsimile provided by Imran Ghory -- well post-period, but still interesting. (more)
• Repetición de amores y Arte de ajedrez -- Online facsimile of a 1497 Spanish book on Chess at the La Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico (more)
• The Compleat Gamester, 1674 edition -- A facsimile of a late 17th century book by Cotton, available on Google Books. (more)
• The Playe of Chess -- Relatively high-resolution images at Digital Bodleian, from Caxton's English translation (c. 1483) 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)
• The Web Gallery of Art -- A useful virtual museum with a lot of period artworks. (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)
• Vat.lat.5854 -- An apparently-anonymous (?), but large and interesting undated manuscript, full of what appears 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)
• Wikipedia article on the painting 'Children's Games' -- 1560 oil painting of children playing various games by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. (more)