Playful Encounters. Science-themed Card and Board-games across the Channel (c. 1790-1850)

Since their origins, board-games and card games have been protagonists of encounters and exchange among countries. Educational games, about history, geography or sciences, are no exceptions. This paper focuses on sciencethemed games which circulated between London and Paris during the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century: the period saw in fact the peak in the production of educational games, but also in the crossfertilization from France to England and back. For this reason, they can be a valuable source (still understudied) in order to investigate the circulation and dissemination of scientific knowledge from a new perspective. Some of these games were translated, but within the translation process some elements were modified; some others simply shared the same topics, but they did represent and communicate them in (meaningfully) different ways. As it will be shown, in fact, French and English authors and publishers addressed different contexts and audiences and proposed different uses for these games: consequently, scientific notions and images were re-elaborated and transformed from time to time.