With my face downward, do at shove-board play."
"Penny-prick" is described as "a game consisting of casting oblong pieces of iron at a mark." Another writer explains it as "throwing at halfpence placed on sticks which are called hobs." It was a common game as early as the fifteenth century, and is reproved by a religious writer of that period, probably because it was used for gambling.
Card-playing had become so general in the time of Henry VIII. that a statute was enacted forbidding apprentices to use cards except in the Christmas holidays, and then only in their masters' houses. Many different games with cards are mentioned by writers of the time, but few of them are described minutely enough to make it clear how they were played.
Backgammon, or "tables," as it was called, was popular in Shakespeare's time. He refers to it in Love's Labour's Lost (v. 2. 326), where Biron, ridiculing Boyet, says:—
"This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice,
That, when he plays at tables, chides the dice
In honourable terms."
"Tick-tack" was a kind of backgammon; alluded to, figuratively, in Measure for Measure (i. 2. 196): "thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack."
"Tray-trip" was a game of dice, in which success depended upon throwing a "tray" (the French trois, or three); mentioned in Twelfth Night (ii. 5. 207): "Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip, and become thy bond-slave?"
"Troll-my-dames" was a game resembling the modern bagatelle. The name is a corruption of the French trou-madame. It was also known as "pigeon-holes." Dr. John Jones, in his Ancient Baths of Buckstone (1572) refers to it thus: "The ladies, gentlewomen, wives and maids, may in one of the galleries walk; and if the weather be not agreeable to their expectation, they may have in the end of a bench eleven holes made, into the which to troll pummets, or bowls of lead, big, little, or mean, or also of copper, tin, wood, either violent or soft, after their own discretion: the pastime troule-in-madame is called."