Pastimes is a small mod about old games that are still very much alive.

I made it for ModJam 2026 around the theme “Echoes of the Past.” When I first saw the theme, my mind went to things that have survived for centuries without becoming relics. Games felt like a pretty natural fit.

People played chess and draughts hundreds of years ago, and we still sit down and play them now. The rules changed here and there, the boards changed, the people obviously changed, but the games stayed.

So Pastimes puts some of those games into Minecraft as actual parts of the world.

Games

Right now, the mod includes Chess and Russian Draughts. Both can be played against another player or against villagers.

The boards are physical blocks you can place in the world, and plains villages can sometimes generate with a place to play around their central meeting area.

Chess

Chess follows the standard rules, including check, checkmate, castling, en passant, pawn promotion, stalemate, and draws by agreement.

Russian Draughts

Checkers uses Russian draughts rules. Captures are mandatory, kings can move across open diagonals, and a piece that reaches the back row during a capture is crowned immediately and continues the sequence as a king.

Backgammon and Go are planned additions.

Playing with villagers

Villagers can be challenged to a game, but they are not all equally good at it. Each villager gets a hidden skill level, and the only real way to learn how strong someone is is to play them.

Profession influences that skill: librarians tend to play strongly, while unemployed villagers tend to be weaker. Their level is never shown directly and does not change later if their profession changes.

Villagers may also put up a prize before the game begins.

Beat them, and you get it.

The kind of prize depends on their profession, while its quality depends on how strong they are. A librarian might offer an enchanted book, a toolsmith a pickaxe, a weaponsmith a sword, while farmers and other villagers may offer food, emeralds, diamonds, or other useful items.

There is no penalty for losing. The prize is shown before the game, so you always know what is being played for.

Villagers are not always available. They may be asleep, caught in a raid, already playing someone else, too far from home, or unwilling to play again immediately after a recent loss.

If nightfall or danger interrupts a game, it is adjourned rather than discarded and can be continued later.

Echoes of the Past

The idea behind Pastimes is simple: these are games old enough to belong to history, but they never really left it.

Chess, draughts, backgammon, Go and other traditional games have passed through generations, places and centuries while remaining recognisable things people still sit down and play today.

That felt like my favourite interpretation of “Echoes of the Past”: not something buried and forgotten, but something from the past whose echo is still clearly heard now.