Chess boards with a crease in the middle were originally invented by an eccentric 12th-century priest who needed a clever way to hide his illegal gaming habits from his strict religious superiors.

A closer look

Chess boards with a crease in the middle were originally invented by an eccentric 12th-century priest who needed a clever way to hide his illegal gaming habits from his strict religious superiors. At the time, the church heavily frowned upon playing board games, viewing them as sinful distractions from prayer and holy duties. To bypass this irritating moral restriction, the priest simply designed a board that folded perfectly in half to look exactly like two identical leather-bound books sitting on a bookshelf. Every single time you pack up a modern board game and fold the cardboard down the middle, you are actively benefiting from the deceptive ingenuity of a medieval holy man who just wanted to play a strategic war game without getting excommunicated. It is nice to know that religious hypocrisy has consistently been a powerful engine for design innovation throughout human history