With the six spaces reading captions like ‘He who plays loses and he who does not play wins,’ ‘Dancing you will lose more than you believe’ and ‘Looking at oneself in the mirror, you lose,’ the game provided blatant commentary on how men and women should conduct themselves in private and public.
93 Called Gioco della Verità (game of truth), this particular game was played with just one die: throwing one to five meant that the player had to pay either one or four coins and a six won the pot. Enjoying significant popularity in their time, these dice and board games depicted everyday places and social situations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bologna – often in a humoristic way. The figure above is taken from one of the thirty-three didactic games that Bologna-born engraver Giuseppe Maria Mitelli made between 16.