Where this game comes from
Bulls and Cows, and the peg game
Bulls and Cows is a pencil-and-paper guessing game with hidden digits. In 1970 Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert, made a board game much like it, with coloured pegs. A plastics company near Leicester, England, Invicta, sold the peg game from 1971.
One thing to hold: A plastic board with rows of holes, a hidden row of four coloured pegs behind a shield, and small black and white pegs for the answers.
Why it matters: Every answer rules codes out. In the 1970s the computer scientist Donald Knuth showed that a careful player can always find any of the 1,296 codes in five guesses or fewer.
What we don’t know: Nobody knows who first played Bulls and Cows or when. It may be about a century old.
Dates:
- 1970 Mordecai Meirowitz makes the peg version.
- 1971 Invicta Plastics starts selling the peg game.
- 2021 A daily five-letter word game puts the same loop online, with letters instead of pegs.