Ancient Games

Board games can be classified into several categories.

Murray devised 5 categories:

• Games of alignment and configuration (Examples: noughts and crosses, peg solitaire)
• War games (Examples: chess, draughts)
• Hunt games (Examples: fox and geese)
• Race games (Examples: backgammon)
• Mancala games (Example: mancala)

Bell decided upon a total of 6 categories:

• Race games (Examples: backgammon)
• War games (Examples: chess, draughts)
• Games of position (Examples: noughts and crosses, peg solitaire)
• Mancala games (Example: mancala)
• Dice games (Examples: hazard)
• Domino games (Examples: mahjong)

David Parlett opted for four categories:

• Race games
• Space games
• Chase games
• Displace games

The Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur (also known as The Game of Twenty Squares) is an ancient board game that was discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley. He discovered the gaming boards while carrying out excavations in the ancient city of Ur, in Mesopotamia, in the 1920s. These boards were sealed in the royal tombs of the First Dynasty of Ur (Murray, 1952). The boards date from around 3000bc, making them likely to be some of the oldest game boards in existence (Masters, 1997).

The board consists of a set of six squares (in a 2x3 grid) and a set of twelve squares (in a 4x3 grid), joined by a bridge of two squares. The game requires two players, each of whom are given 7 playing pieces. The game uses tetrahedral dice, or sometimes, four-sided throwing sticks (Finkel, 2008). Other variations of the game board were discovered in tombs of the ‘Empire’ age, about 1580bc (Bell, 1979). These new boards had removed the 2x3 grid at the end of the board, and had instead extended the bridge with a 6x1 grid (so the bridge was eight squares long in total). It is thought that the game is ultimately a race to get all of the player’s pieces to the end of the board, with the bridge area most likely being used to ‘battle’, so players can try to eliminate each other’s pieces. The newer board has a longer section for battles, making the game less predictable. After playing The Royal Game of Ur on both boards, I decided to use the newer board, as it seemed to be more successful at keeping the player interested throughout the game.

Original Game Board:

Newer Game Board:

No official rules have been found for The Royal Game of Ur, but a variety of rules have been interpreted from the available information. These are the rules as interpreted by Finkel:

• Each player has seven pieces.
• Use four tetrahedral dice, with two marked corners and two unmarked corners. Marked corners equal one point and unmarked corners equal no points. So with four tetrahedral dice the minimum roll can be zero and the maximum can be four. Each turn, players move the number of points rolled.
• The pieces do not start on the board. Pieces start lined up along the edge of the board, next to the player’s start space. When one player moves their piece onto the board it starts at START SPACE A, and the other player starts at START SPACE B. As play continues the pieces move towards the left until they reach the edge of the board, at which point they move into the middle lane, and proceed along it to the end (ADD ARROWS ON DIAGRAM).
• Players can remove the opponent’s pieces from the board by landing their own piece on a square that the opponent’s piece is on. This ‘captured’ piece is removed from the board and must traverse the board again from the beginning.
• The Rosette squares (denoted by stars in the above diagrams), are safe squares and any piece on this square cannot be captured. Landing on the Rosette also allows the player to roll the four dice again, giving them an extra turn.