絵双六
E-sugoroku are Japanese picture-board games played by moving counters over a printed sheet. Dice and written directions determine the journey. Many boards invite players to race from furidashi, the start, to agari, the finish; their pictures turn travel, work, shopping or stories into playable routes.
Read the starting point and directions before choosing a path.
A dice result can mean a number of spaces or a named destination.
Printed boards preserve changing subjects, ambitions and ways of publishing.
Players gather around the sheet with dice and counters. First locate the start, any finish, the names of the spaces and their instructions. The next space in a journey need not be the one immediately beside the counter on the paper.
In mawari-sugoroku, the dice normally tell a player how many spaces to move along an ordered route. A particular board may also tell players to miss a turn, go back or take a branch. Rules for a throw that would pass the finish belong to that board.
In tobi-sugoroku, a space pairs dice results with destinations. Read the direction for the number just thrown, then move straight to the named space. The route can jump across the sheet. The examples explained by Tokyo Gakugei University leave a player in place when the throw has no listed destination.
Edo meisho shiki yūsan sugoroku takes players from a first view of Mount Fuji at Nihonbashi to an Asakusa market. The National Diet Library identifies missed turns, backward movement for excess points at the finish and even jumps within this mawari board. Its directions matter more than a simple category label.
Kamakura Enoshima Ōyama shinpan ōrai sugoroku starts at Nihonbashi, visits places around Edo and returns to Nihonbashi. It has no separate agari. A printed journey can therefore work differently from a familiar start-to-finish race.
Ban-sugoroku is an older board game using numerous black and white pieces. It should be distinguished from the printed picture games that spread in the Edo period. The National Diet Library also identifies Buddhist teaching boards, including Pure Land sugoroku, as part of the picture games’ background. One history cannot simply supply the other’s starting date.
E-sugoroku became popular entertainment among Edo-period townspeople. Well-known artists designed many colourful sheets, which could be admired as prints as well as played. Some subjects demanded an older participant’s knowledge; these were not exclusively games for small children.
Sangū jōkyō dōchū ichiran sugoroku combines a journey from Nihonbashi with a visit to Ise and a finish at Kyoto. Its bird’s-eye arrangement of Mount Fuji and the destinations does not reproduce their actual geography. Travel boards offered places and journeys through a composition made for play.
Promotion boards pictured ambitions within contemporary society. Kotobuki shusse sugoroku includes paths through merchant service toward wholesale business and wealth, alongside spaces of rejection or withdrawal. Such a route presents an imagined life and its values, rather than a statistical account of how everyone lived.
Kosanba made Hatsuakinai shusse sugoroku to advertise products from his own business. Another board, Shinpan gofunai ryūkō meibutsu annai sugoroku, tours fashionable Edo restaurants and local scenes. A single shop’s advertisement and a journey among famous establishments put commerce to different uses on the sheet.
School knowledge, new transport, parliament and war joined the range of subjects in the Meiji period. An aspirational finish might now be a government minister, a university head or study overseas. Educational boards added new information while retaining moral lessons familiar from earlier sheets.
The National Diet Library describes newer printing methods, including letterpress, making large runs easier. From the late Meiji period, boards became popular supplements to magazines for boys and girls. Families played them at New Year before the Second World War, and Shōwa-period sheets also featured manga characters.
Yo wa susumu denwa sugoroku uses telephone conversations as its subject. In the university library’s reading, the player finds the dice number on a telephone pole and follows the connected wire to the next space. The communication network itself supplies the route, rather than merely decorating it.
Postwar television and video games were among the diversifying entertainments that reduced opportunities to play traditional sugoroku. Libraries and museums now preserve the sheets as records of printing and everyday imagination. A 2022 Tokyo Gakugei University exhibition used reproductions to demonstrate play, explicitly distinguishing its modern demonstrations from historical practice.
Mawari normally converts it into spaces to count along a route. Tobi uses the current space’s directions to identify a destination. Individual boards can add further rules.
A tobi route can leap across the sheet, and even a mawari board may include jumps or branches.
No. The Kamakura–Enoshima–Ōyama excursion described here returns to its starting point at Nihonbashi without a separate agari.
It shows how success, failure and desirable positions were imagined on that board. It does not record a life sequence shared by everyone.
New printing methods aided large runs, while late-Meiji magazines distributed boards as supplements. Subjects expanded to include new schooling, transport and, later, manga characters.