square one

what are you talking about???

fansy, Are you assuming that the source of the phrase "back to square one" is a game? Here's some info I picked up:

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Origin

The most widely reported suggestions for the origin of this phrase are (1) BBC sports commentaries, (2)board games like snakes and ladders and (3) playground games like hopscotch.



BBC Commentaries:



In order that listeners could follow the progress of the game (Rugby?) in radio commentaries the pitch was divided into eight notional squares. Commentators described the play by saying which square the ball was in. The Radio Times, which was and is the BBC's listings guide, refers to the practice in an issue from January 1927.



(but...) These commentaries certainly happened and prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports commentary (of a rugby match). That commentary, and many others that followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second commentator called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to square. However, at no point in any existing commentary do they use the phrase 'back to square one'.



Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a January 2007 issue of The Radio Times which celebrated 80 years of BBC football commentary. In this the football commentator John Murray stated with confidence that "Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'" and that "the grid system ... was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase 'back to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)".



This confidence is despite the fact that, although it could be true, is it nothing but conjecture. What is a fact is that the BBC broadcast a popular etymology series Balderdash and Piffle in collaboration with the Oxford English Dictionary 2006. This questioned the claim that the BBC commentaries were the source and the claim that the phrase was in circulation in the 1930s.



Board Games:


Many people report that the phrase refers to snakes and ladders or similar board games. The earliest citation of the phrase in print is currently 1952, from the Economic Journal:



"He has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."



(but...) It isn't a feature of snakes and ladders that players are sent back to square one. Few examples of boards that have a snake in the first square exist. For the phrase to have come from that source people must have had occasion to use it, and that appears not to be the case with snakes and ladders.



Hopscotch

This playground game is played on a grid of numbered squares. The precise rules of the game vary from place to place but usually involves players hopping from square to square, missing out the square containing their thrown stone. They go from one to (usually) eight or ten and then back to square one.



All of the above are plausible enough to gain supporters. As is usual with phrases of uncertain origin, most people are happy to believe the first explanation they hear. There's no real evidence to put the origin beyond reasonable doubt, and so that remains uncertain.



Whatever the source, 1952 is surprisingly late as the earliest printing for a phrase that was certainly in the spoken language much earlier than that. There are many believable hearsay examples from at least thirty years earlier. Perhaps a printed source from before 1952 will yield the truth?


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There are other possible sources. You can find them at google. Enter "square one" source of phrase.

about square one
Square One:
Extended meaning: starting point, to begin something all over again.
Board game: a game where the looser will begin all over again from the starting point.

What I'd like you to show me, is a photo showing exactly what this board game looks like. Please insert a picture. Thanks.

Here's a picture of Snakes and Ladders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_ladders
I don't remember ever playing it, so the rebuttal above may be correct and it's not the source, in spite of what people generally seem to think.

The phrase is a bit more than just starting over--it has the connotation that whatever you were doing went seriously awry, might even be disastrously so, so you have to go back to the very beginnning and start all over again, rethink the whole thing, find a new game plan.

Many games are played on a board and start out at square one. To go "back to square one" means to go back to the beginning.

This is also used as an idiom to mean to go back to the beginning, and start over.

We entered the wrong data, so we had to go back to square one.