Good news — the government probably doesn’t care how you play games. If you drop money in the center of the Monopoly board, and it goes to whoever lands on Free Parking, no one will throw you in jail (either in the game or in real life). Even in the Super Bowl, if someone breaks the rules by grabbing onto the wrong player, that’s none of the government’s business. It’s up to the ref to assign a penalty because the sport itself enforces its own rules.
Even so, the government sometimes finds an excuse to interfere. Maybe it’s because they think they’re not getting their cut. Or maybe it’s because they think the game will destroy the whole nation.
A Massive FBI Investigation Looked into Bingo
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Bingo is the most boring game of all. It’s most popular among people who are so old, the retirement home doesn’t trust them to play anything more interesting. But when the prizes are big, it’s gambling, and gambling doesn’t need to be interesting (just look at slot machines). And in states that ban most gambling, but issue special licenses for charity bingo, bingo may be the only form of gambling available.
In the 1980s, people in Tennessee were bribing the government into issuing them bingo licenses, so they could host bingo games. No proceeds from the games went to charity, but even so, you might ask, “So what?” Indeed, this article from 1989, from the very newspaper that had been investigating this scandal, repeatedly posed the question “so what?” to sum up how little anyone thought this worth investigating.
But the FBI investigated anyway, and they ended up arresting 50 people. Most notably, the majority leader of the state’s House of Representatives was sentenced to five years in prison. More serious than that, though, one politician implicated in the scandal killed himself before he could be convicted. Wait, no, correction: Two politicians implicated in the scandal killed themselves before they could be convicted. The FBI probably then quipped, “Didn’t have that on my bingo card,” and went about their day.
Postal Chess Was Banned for Fear of Spies
People were playing chess against remote opponents long before the internet. They played chess over the post, sending their moves to an opponent and then waiting for a reply. Naturally, this wasn’t a very speedy version of chess, as each move could take days rather than minutes. But if you were dedicated enough, it’d still excite you, since you’d be playing many different games simultaneously during those days — maybe even thousands of games at once.
During World War II, soldiers in the Allied armies had fun playing correspondence chess. The world’s postal chess association had been headquartered in Berlin till this point, and had recently shut down for Nazi reasons, so soldiers now organized their matches themselves. They played from 1939 to 1943. That’s when U.S. censors started blotting out every chess diagram they saw in military mail, ruining the games.
Soldiers could be using these mysterious diagrams to send encoded secrets to the enemy, feared the censors. Of course, if you know how chess works, a quick glance at the diagrams could tell you whether the game’s legit, but the censors took no chances. We don’t know why they started this policy in 1943, after years of incident-free chess. If they allowed the troops to continue chess, morale would have risen, we’d have won the war sooner and untold thousands of innocents would have been spared.
Iceland Regulates How You Name Your Racehorse
Racehorses have weird names, and half the fun of watching a race is listening to the announcer rattle off those names. In any random Kentucky Derby, you’ll have Just a Touch running up to Catching Freedom, while Cyclone Mischief zooms past Jimmy Scrambles and Tiz the Bomb to take the lead.
Not so in Iceland. Iceland has a Horse Naming Committee, and if you want your horse to ever be up for sale or breeding, it needs to conform to Icelandic naming convention. And it needs to have an Icelandic name.
Baldur is fine. So is Bjork or Alfgrimur. But they will not permit any name that sounds too foreign. So, next time you meet someone from Iceland, feel free to call them racist. That might not be an entirely fair charge, but those Icelandic people keep talking about how awesome they are, and we’d like to take them down a peg.
Canada Makes You Do Math to Collect Your Prize
In Canada, the government can run lotteries, but no one else can. Gambling is legal in some regions, with plenty of casinos, but you aren’t allowed to run a lottery unless you happen to be a government. A “lottery” is defined as a game of chance where you must buy something to enter. This is why sweepstakes (even outside Canada) make sure to say “no purchase necessary.” If a purchase is necessary, it’s a lottery, and it’s possibly an illegal lottery.
In Canada, even “no purchase necessary” may not be enough to free a sweepstakes from being labeled a lottery. They also have to prove it’s skill-based, not pure luck. Often, the contest is purely luck-based — skill-based contests attract fewer entrants, and companies want as many people participating in their stunt as possible — so the company must add one extra step to obscure this. Often, they make every entrant complete a simple math problem.
It isn’t a difficult question. You could do it in your head, and if you can’t, you’re welcome to use a calculator. They even include parentheses to avoid any debate over order of operations.
That last part’s a shame, though, because the easiest way to get engagement on social media is to post a math solution that gets order of operations wrong. Seven million people will reply to you, eager to prove they attended fifth grade.
The British Government Insisted on Making All Aces of Spades
If you look at most decks of cards, the ace of hearts will feature a big heart symbol, which looks like any heart from the deck, only bigger. Same deal with the ace of clubs or diamonds. And then you have the ace of spades, where the enlarged spade is far more elaborate.
This tradition goes back to 18th-century England. The detail in the ace of spades aimed to prevent counterfeiting because back then, the ace of spades was printed by the government. No other cards were — only the ace of spades.
At the time (and for years before and after this, a period lasting 400 years), England taxed playing cards, as an indirect way of taxing gambling. The government printed these aces, and anyone who made cards had to buy them, landing on the government radar. If they tried making their own aces to evade the tax, that was against the law.
In 1805, investigators pursued a card-maker named Richard Harding, since he sold a lot of cards but didn’t seem to buy many aces. They raided his place and found no forgeries. Then they expanded this search and found thousands of forged aces at a daughter’s house, hidden in a basket of her dirty underwear.
The penalty for printing his own aces of spades? They hanged the guy. They never found Jack the Ripper, because he just killed some people, but they executed Dick Harding. Because playing cards, you see, are serious business.
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