Figure 5. Painted wooden board for The Game of Goose on one side and chess and a version of roulette on the other, 19th century. (Bonhams)

The 20th century was a great period for popular board games. Improvements in both printing techniques and manufacturing spawned a plethora of new companies. Thousands of games were produced to meet the massive demand caused by an increasingly affluent middle class. And with this new affluence came leisure. And competition. An original collection might be made of vintage racing board games. Of these, Totopoly™ is probably the most famous. First produced by Waddington's in 1938, Totopoly encouraged children to breed and train their racehorses on one side of the board, and then, by turning over the board to reveal the course, race their horses to the finishing post. One player would act as a bookmaker and take bets. And having played Totopoly in the formative years of one's youth, who could ever forget the evocative names of those miniature thoroughbreds: Marmaduke Jinks, King of Clubs, Priory Park or Jerome Fandor?
Escalado was created by a Swiss inventor, Arthur Gueydan, in 1928, and produced by The Chad Valley Company in the same year. The horses were placed on a tightly stretched cloth and moved forward by vibrations caused by a winding handle. The game was popular with the then Queen Elizabeth (the late Queen Mother), and a Royal Warrant was granted to Chad Valley in 1938. Chad Valley also manufactured two other similar games based on the same mechanism but featuring greyhound and speedboat racing as an alternative.
Figure 1 illustrates The Race Game, a simple, late Edwardian board game of "British Manufacture'. The 'board' is made of card, folded down the middle, and printed with charming, if naive, illustrations of horses and jockeys using the chromolithographic printing process. The "horses' are made from lead (in the manner of toy soldiers) and painted in bright colours. The die is wooden, and the cylindrical shaker made from card. Steeple-chase (figure 2), 'A Thrilling Race Game', is a similar board game, produced by The Harlesden Series around 1930. This game was loosely based on the Grand National; players progressed around the board by throwing dice and either moved forward or backwards when they landed on the appropriate square.
Dirt-track Racing (figure 3) was manufactured in a similar vein but featured all the excitement of the 1920s motorcycle speedway circuit. This game was produced by the Roberts Brothers of Upton Street, Gloucester, otherwise known as Glevum Games ('Glevum' being the Roman name for Gloucester). Founded in 1894, Glevum manufactured and sold a large range of games, toys and children's furniture, becoming one of the largest makers in the British Empire, until they were taken over by Chad Valley in 1956. Chad Valley is an interesting company. It was founded in 1897 by Josef and Albert Johnson, a father and son from the suburbs of Birmingham. The River Chad ran through the Harborne valley, where they built their factory. During the years leading up to the First World War, Chad Valley established a large colonial trade, creating 'colonial' editions of their games for export to the British Empire.
The Sport of Kings (figure 4) is an attractive (and presumably scarce) racing game from the 1960s. Produced by the now defunct Morton Productions of Northampton and Birmingham, it was very similar in concept to Totopoly, if not considerably more complicated, and featured detailed instructions, banknotes, share certificates, veterinary surgeon's notes, race cards, auctioneers' and bookmakers' slips. This was a game for families with time on their hands.