First board game in space

The first board game to be played in space was chess. On 9 June 1970, during the long-duration Soyuz 9 mission, Soviet cosmonauts Vitaly Sevastyanov and Andriyan Nikolayev played a game against Nikolai Kamanin and Viktor Gorbatko at mission control. They used a small travel chessboard with the pieces attached with small pegs.

Soyuz 9 was a mission intended to investigate the consequences of what was then thought of as long-duration spaceflight. At the time, no humans had spent more than 14 days in space, and no Soviet crew had remained in orbit for more than five.

The crew were expected to periodically carry out tests and simple experiments, mostly related to their ability to carry out astronavigation or earth-observation tasks. Aside from these occasional interruptions, however, the job of Sevastyanov and Nikolayev was primarily to be guinea pigs. To alleviate the boredom, mission controllers scheduled in recreational activities to keep them occupied, one of which was the Space vs Earth chess tournament, another was live broadcasts of the 1970 World Cup.

Chess was popular amongst both Soviet cosmonauts and NASA astronauts during this period. Some, like Vitaly Sevastyanov, were serious club-level players (Sevastyanov would go on to serve as the head of the Soviet Chess Federation), while others took to the game as a simple distraction during the many long periods of waiting around that are an unavoidable fact of an astronaut's life.