Robert Charles Bell was the author of several books on board games, most importantly Board and Table Games 1 & 2. This work won the Premier Award of the Doctors' Hobbies Exhibition, London. He was instrumental in popularizing traditional games, and is acknowledged as one of 11 "principal sources" in David Parlett's The OxfordHistory of Board Games.
Life
He was born 1917 in Sudbury, Ontario and moved to England in 1928; and was educated at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire and St Bartholomew's Hospital by 1941. He became a consultant plastic surgeon and was on the editorial board of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. Outside medicine, Bell was a polymath who became an international authority on board games and wrote books for collectors on Tyneside Pottery and Trade Tokens. His first work on games was Board and Table Games, and he later produced many articles on coin collecting for World Coins. He died in 2002. As of 2007, much of his extensive collection of games and game paraphernalia resides at the University of Durham.
Categories of board and table games
Bell gives origins, history and some game-playing details for some 180 games in the 2 volumes of his main work. He divides board games into four main categories:
A race game requires the pieces to move from a start point to a finish point usually based on the throw of dice.
A wargame involves movement and is typically won with the capture of all opponent pieces or a special opponent piece.
A positional game requires the winning player to form a pattern or shape by merely placing or placing and moving pieces on a board.
Mancala games involve players distributing seeds across a series of holes and collecting the contents of holes that achieve specific numeric or numeric/positional status. Typically one wins by collecting the most seeds, or rendering the opponent unable to move.
Bell used the basic categories suggested by Murray with some alterations. Because his treatment extended beyond board games, Bell also included the categories of dice and domino games; and in his second volume added "Games of Words and Numbers", "Card Games Requiring Boards", and "Games of manual dexterity". In addition, there is mention of the subgenre of solitaire and puzzle games. Bell drew on a wide range of sources, including Edward Falkener, Stewart Culin, Willard Fiske, H. J. R. Murray, John Scarne, and many others; as well as his own research and collection.
Token Tales – a series of articles, originally appearing in 'World Coins' in the 1960s and 1970s, republished by the Conder Token Collector's Club from 2003
Games Of The World – this book, edited by Frederic V. Grunfeld and published by Ballantine Books of New York in 1975, cited R.C. Bell and Léon Vié as Editorial Consultants.
