Kunsthistorisches Museum — Vienna, Austria

This was one of a set marking the turns of the year — six of them, apparently, though only five made it through. They were painted for a rich merchant's house rather than a church, which was still a fairly new idea. It's said the winters around then were genuinely savage across that part of Europe, so the cold isn't invented.

Historians have reportedly counted somewhere close to ninety separate games hidden in this one board - tug of war, leapfrog, hoop-rolling, plus a few nobody's been able to name for sure.

This one's sometimes read as a stand-in for painting itself - the model's laurel wreath, trumpet and book are meant to be Clio, the muse of history. Whoever made it, from what I can find, held onto this one for his whole life and never sold it, even when money was tight.

The whole square is apparently one big argument — the feast season on one side, the fasting season on the other, the inn and the church facing off across the middle. Nearly two hundred people in there, from what I've read, and supposedly almost every one of them is doing something you could put a name to, if you knew the customs.