2200BC: Legend has it that the ancient and wise Chinese Emperor Tang Yao created the two-player board game Go to keep his dim-witted son quiet. Over 4,000 years later, casual Go players are still distracted by unruly offspring playing Halo 3 online in the room next door.

400: Chess is first played in India. Or China. Or possibly Ancient Persia. We do know for sure that whoever made it up, they’re not seeing a penny of the royalties.

1200: Playing cards are invented in China, complete with suits that live on in Mah-jong today. We suspect the first card sharks also emerge around this time.

1769: Legend has it that Captain Cook is so often locked away in his cabin playing a four colour match-‘em-up game that’s it’s christened by crewmates ‘The Captain’s Mistress’.

1829: The first card game similar to modern poker emerges in New Orleans. It soon spreads along the Mississippi via gambling riverboats.

1850: The four-player tile-based strategy game Mah-jong is invented from a fusion of Chinese playing cards and domino tiles.

1865: Poker gains several innovations during the American Civil War, including the development of stud poker and the introduction of the straight. With most of the country armed, the stakes are presumably higher than ever before or since.

1850s: Parlour games, in which adults play childlike games in the room of that name, are hugely popular in Victorian England, as those members of the upper classes not invading foreign lands for Queen and Country suddenly have more free time on their hands. Blindman’s Bluff and Charades are among those that still survive, along with the railways.

1889: Tiddledy-Winks is trademarked. It becomes a huge craze amongst of all groups the following decade. Later generations cannot cope with such sophistication, renaming the button bouncing game ‘Tiddlywinks’.

1913: The New York World publishes Arthur Wynne’s ‘word-cross’ puzzle, generally considered the world’s first crossword puzzle, not to mention the first crossword anagram: the name is not changed to ‘crossword’ for some years.

1920s: Mah-jong mania travels over from China and soon enthrals US housewives. It even inspires hit songs.

1933: Parker Brothers rejects the first version of the quintessential board game Monopoly. Over 250 million copies of the tweaked version have since been sold. (Pah, they probably didn’t agree with putting hotels on Vine Street and Great Marlborough Street, either).

1970: The World Series of Poker plays a big role in the growing popularity of the gambling game.

1972: The world’s first successful electronic arcade game Pong is also the first casual game, after publisher and Atari founder laments of his previous flop: “You had to read the instructions before you could play – people didn't want to read instructions.” Californians queue down the street to pay to play the first version.

1974: The term ‘Internet’ is coined.

1974: The Captain's Mistress is reworked into Connect 4. Later generations of computerised casual players will prefer to match merely three colours in a row, provoking accusations of dumbing down among by game historians who are rubbish at Bejewelled.

1978: Paul Alfille creates a solitaire card game, Freecell, for the University of Illinois' educational computer system.

1978: Space Invaders debuts in Japan, and the era of the amusement arcade begins.

1979: An American architect, Howard Garns, invents a number/crossword hybrid that he calls ‘Number Place’.

1986: Number Place becomes a big hit in Japan under its new name, Sudoku.

1989: Will Wright’s Sim City hits the high street. The urban construction kit attracts fans far from gaming’s usual demographic, but 40 years too late to prevent Milton Keynes.

1989: Tetris, invented in 1985 by Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov, is bundled with Nintendo’s Game Boy.

1990: Solitaire is included with Windows 3.0.

1991: The embryonic World Wide Web is made publicly accessible via the Internet.

1993: Doom is launched as shareware, eventually selling a million copies and proving that try-before-you-buy will work with PC entertainment products. (It could only be considered a casual game by mass-murderers, however).

1993: Point-and-click adventure Myst debuts on the Macintosh. The later PC version becomes one of the best-selling games of the decade, despite derision from gamers and the gaming press.

1995: Sierra releases the first of many You Don’t Know Jack trivia games for PC.

1996: The Tamagotchi craze sees millions clearing up digital pet poo.

1996: Microsoft acquires the small Internet games site known as The Village, and rebrands it ‘Internet Gaming Zone’, which is to eventually become the casual games portal MSN Games.

1997: Yahoo acquires ClassicGames.com, sowing the seeds of Yahoo Games.

1997: The Nokia 6110 arrives embedded with Snake. Mobile games are predicted to takeover the world. The world is still waiting.

1999: The Pogo.com brand is launched, based around a games portal built out of five years of mergers and rebrandings by pioneering Internet games businesses.

1999: Late Night Poker is broadcast in the UK, introducing the card game to the old country.

1999: In Japan, NTT DoCoMo launches i-mode, the first service to successfully sell mobile games over the air.

1999: Collapse! from GameHouse kicking off another blockbuster colour-matching brand.

2000: Will Wright’s family-friendly The Sims goes on sale, again to huge scepticism from the games industry and the specialist press, and this time even from his own colleagues. The Sims sells six million copies within two years, and has been updated many times since.

2000: Online skill-based game portals are launched by WorldWinner and SkillJam.

2000: PopCap releases Diamond Mine, a web-based Flash colour-matching game.

2001: Diamond Mine is renamed Bejeweled and launched on Microsoft’s Gaming Zone. It goes on to sell 10 million copies across various portals, and has been downloaded 150 million times.

2001: Game behemoth Electronic Arts wades into casual gaming with its $40 million purchase of Pogo.com.

2002: The first version of Insaniquarium wins its developer, Flying Bear Entertainment, an award for Innovation in Games Design at GDC.

2002: The interactive DVD game market gets its first hit products, courtesy of Screenlife’s DVD board game Scene It? in the US, and a DVD version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire from Zootech in the UK.

2003: PopCap debuts its wordplay game Bookworm.

2003: Virtual world Second Life is launched by Linden Lab.

2003: Gamelab releases casual action game smash Diner Dash.

2004: Jewel Quest from iWin brings storytelling to the puzzle games.

2004: Facebook is launched at Harvard University. Someone first makes someone who isn’t really a friend a Friend, and has regretted it ever since.

2004: Yetisports spreads virally around the corporate world, helping Flash-based web games (and, for a period, penguin tossing) to become an everyday part of office life.

2004: The launch of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade brings downloadable casual games to home consoles.

2004: Nintendo releases the dual-screen Nintendo DS. It quickly reaches beyond the youth-orientated demographic of previous Nintendo Game Boy, not least because signature like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training become insanely popular with doddering old folks who’ve forgotten they don’t like video games.

2004: GDC runs its first Casual Games Summit. Nine people attend.

2005: Casual Games Association is formed.

2005: The gorgeous yet simple Tetris-style puzzler Lumines becomes the first universally acclaimed game on Sony’s all singing, all-dancing PSP handheld.

2005: Buzz!: The Music Quiz brings social gaming to PlayStation 2, complete with TV gameshow style buzzers. The series has since sold more than four million copies.

2005: Mystery Case Files: Huntsville from Big Fish Studios establishes the hidden object genre, reintroducing casual gamers to the point-and-click gameplay style pioneered by PC hits like Myst.

2006: Nintendo launches its mass-market friendly Wii home console. By the end of 2007 it is established as the best-selling of its generation of home consoles, ahead of the more technically capable Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

2007: Peggle, a casual games riff on Japanese Pachinko machines, is released by PopCap.

2007: Facebook launches Facebook Platform, enable applications to be run across the service. Games such as versions of chess and Scrabble (Scrabulous) are quickly established as among the most popular.

2007: EA launches a casual games division, EA Casual Entertainment

Have we missed anything? Let us know if there are any major casual games events you think should be in here via the comments section below.