Early boxed vintage game Tiddlywinks with original Bakelite cup, counters and dice in lovely condition, by Berwick of Liverpool.
14cm x 9cm.
Tiddlywinks was first patented in England by Joseph Assheton Fincher of London as A New and Improved Game. The patent application was filed on 8 November 1888, the complete specification left on 8 August 1889, and it was accepted on 19 October 1889. A set is known to exist with the label ‘Joseph Fincher, Inventor’, although Fincher is not at all well known as a games publisher.
The game, which Fincher called Tiddledy-Winks, was played with ‘counters or flippers made of wood, ivory, bone or other substance, and a bowl or vessel of any shape, made of wood, china, glass, ivory or other substance, the object of the said counters or flippers being to press the edge of a smaller set of counters provided for the purpose and so cause them to jump into the bowl or vessel placed in the centre of the table’.
What was new about the game, Fincher claimed, was the use of a bowl and counters, the act of flipping the counter, and the use of one counter to flip another.