Candace Richards, assistant Curator of the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Collection, has always been interested in board games.
As a child she played backgammon, and she was glad to turn this pastime into a study after the University of Sydney uncovered five different board games at the Paphos Theatre in Cyprus. Now, she has a chance to share both her love of games and archaeology, with Australian audiences as part of the Kafenio events focused on Greek culture through board games and conversation with free talks and hands-on experiences from tonight through to 16 April.
“Games are a great way to connect with history,” she said. “They are absolutely still relevant, and though we’ve lost the rules, we can still reverse engineer these and it is fun to see if we can apply the same rules as now. By getting kids to handle artifacts they recognise and can still use today, by having things like that from the ancient world, helps us all to learn history and connect with the past. That’s the key for lifelong learning and lifelong engagement.”