Elliott Avedon Museum of Games

At the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), this online resource is one of our favorite places to visit. New content is added from time to time to keep things fresh and interesting, and as a researcher into ancient board games it is a priceless resource available to us free of charge and with a few mouse-clicks! (Game board discovered at Knossos Palace, circa 1500 BCE).

Established in 1971, the Museum is a public institution dedicated to research and the collection, preservation, and exhibition of games and game-related objects. The Museum Website was first begun in 1993 and continues to evolve. Photographs, other graphics, and pages with new information are periodically added to this site, offering a "virtual visit" to the Museum. The Website includes over 700 pages. Each Webpage is part of a "virtual" Museum exhibit. The Museum collection is extensive and the University offers Web viewers access to as much of its collection as resources will permit. As new "Virtual Exhibits" are added, indices are updated.

The Virtual Exhibits item takes you to a clickable list of collection objects, such as Boxed Games, Playing Cards, Electronic Games, etc. organized as Museum Exhibits. An "exhibit" will have one or more Webpages concerning the games in that particular exhibit. Nevertheless, a viewer can go directly to a Webpage about a specific game of interest by using the Google Tool Bar at the top of each page, inputting the name of the game, and clicking the "search" button.

About Games includes pages dealing with ethnography, origins, and diffusion of games in general. The Archives item contains scanned documents of published papers by game ethnologists and historians. FAQ answers general questions which previous viewers have frequently asked. Web Links is a clickable list for other sites with information about games.

The Museum item includes a number of pages about the "physical" Museum rather than the "virtual" one on the Web. These items include pages about the collection which is cared for by Museum personnel, and about the On-Campus Gallery in which the collection is exhibited. The Museum's resources for researches who come on campus to conduct research on games is explained in this section. Information is provided about where the Museum is housed on the University campus along with the available parking and public transportation facilities.