Wallis’s Wonders of Nature Board Game, 1818

Wallis’s Elegant and Instructive Game Exhibiting the Wonders of Nature in Each Quarter of the World, London, E. Wallis, 42 Skinner Street, Snow Hill, London, 1st Novr, 1818, hand-cololoured engraving, folding paper mounted on linen. Rare.

In a sympathetic wooden box display frame (painted in a tasteful Farrow & Ball grey-green).

Dimensions: 50.5cm x 60.6cm (including frame).

Reference: Linman, E: Georgian & Victorian Board Games, pp. 17, 172-175.

Stock Reference: LH 1380

The same game is in in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art: "Edward Wallis's game board consists of twenty-six vignettes depicting different natural sites around the world. Geological "wonders of nature," such as 'Fingal's Cave on the Island of Staffa' and dramatic natural disasters, like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that resulted in 70,000 deaths, are described in the accompanying booklet, along with any forfeits the player might have to pay upon landing on certain spaces. Arriving at 'Ice Mountains of the North Pole', for example, meant the player lost his turns three times: "whoever is so daring as to go venture amidst these awful scenes, must be frozen in, while the other players spin thrice round."