Iterating The Royal Game of Ur

Iterating the Royal Game of Ur

By Giselle Czajka

In this essay, I will be analysing the ancient board game, The Royal Game of Ur, and iterating it to see if the gameplay can be improved.

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. For this study, I am going to use a basic set of rules 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.

I made several iterations to the game, but the following iterations were the ones that I felt had the best impact on gameplay.

The first aspect of the game I wanted to focus on was the amount on skill and chance involved. The game seemed to be tilted slightly more in favour of luck than skill, with the dice rolls being the main focus of the game. Luck and skill elements are both important, and enrich games in different ways. Luck is a valuable game component, because it makes the game more appealing to a wider audience, and players of every skill level can feel like they have a chance to win (Braithwaite & Schreiber, 2008). Having luck elements in a game also gives a game more replay value, because the game cannot be fully mastered. Skill also plays a part in making a good game, because skill elements give players more control, making them feel more involved in the game. If a game relies purely on chance, then the player will feel like they are just there to move the pieces, and will feel distanced from the game. For my first iteration I attempted to add an extra skill element to the game. I did this by adding the option to ‘double up’ pieces, meaning that a player can put up to two of their pieces on the same square. If two pieces are on the same square then the opponent cannot capture these pieces. This gives the player more control over how they play: they can either choose to play cautiously and double up their pieces to make them safe, or take a risk to try and capture the opponent’s pieces. I found that this iteration worked well, as the middle lane is fairly long, and the pieces have quite a distance to travel before they can get to the end of the board. This way the player doesn’t feel pressured to always move a piece once it gets to the middle lane, in an attempt to keep it ahead of the opponent’s pieces and not get captured.

For my second iteration, I wanted to add something to give the losing player a chance to catch up, so that they do not become disinterested in the game. This is called a negative feedback system (LeBlanc, 2006). If one player has at least double the pieces in play of the other player, the player with the most pieces in play gets to take two turns every turn. For example, if player A has six pieces in play, and player B has two pieces in play, then player A gets to roll the four tetrahedral dice, take their turn, and then roll the dice again, for a second turn. ‘In play’ refers to both the pieces on the board, and the pieces yet to be played (pieces that have already reached the end of the board and left play do not count). For example, in the diagram below, all of the pieces that are not in the red box are counted as in play. The player with the purple pieces is ahead, as they have four pieces that have reached the end of the board, while the player with the black pieces only has one piece that has reached the end of the board. So, for the counters in play, the numbers are six black to three purple. This means that the player using the black counters gets to have double turns.

 With this iteration I found that if both players had few pieces, i.e. Player A had two pieces and player B had one piece, then this would give player A too much of an advantage, even when he is not very far behind player B. I then tweaked the iteration, so that the double turn only applies when one player has at least double the pieces of the other player, AND one player has at least three pieces more than the other player. This improved the iteration a lot, only giving the double turn to players that are very far behind. 

I noticed that players could often get stuck in a run of bad luck, with both players rolling zeros, and the gameplay would be unable to progress during that time. To counter this, I added another iteration, one in which a player could re-roll if they rolled a zero, giving them a chance to roll a better number. I decided that this should be limited to only one extra roll per turn for this mechanic, because if a player could always reroll, then the zero roll would be pointless.

For the final iteration I wanted to make a change that adds a positive feedback system to the game. A positive feedback system helps to bring games to a conclusion, so the gameplay does not become stagnant (LeBlanc, 2006). I added a mechanic where, if a piece is captured, instead of going back to the start, it goes into a ‘held hostage’ pile. Once a piece is in this pile, a roll of 2 needs to be made before the piece can return into play. So for example, if a piece is being held hostage, and the player who owns the piece rolls a 2, they can either use that roll on a piece that is not held hostage, or use the 2 to ‘free’ the hostage. If the piece is freed then it goes back to the line of pieces that are yet to be played. There is no limit to how many pieces can be held hostage. The hostage pile acts as a positive feedback system, because a player gets most of the opponent’s pieces into the hostage pile, then they will have no competition as they move their pieces to the end of the board. This also adds more risk and reward to the game, as leaving a piece open to be captured now can have higher consequences.

I think that all of the iterations mentioned above have improved the game in various ways, while still keeping the game true to its original form. I feel that my iterations have modernised the game, using knowledge from research that has been made into gaming since its discovery.

Bibliography

·         Bell, R. C. (1979) Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations. Revised edition. pp. 23-25. 

·         Braithwaite, B. & Schreiber, I. (2008) Challenges For Games Designers Charles River Media pp. 69-99 (chapters 5 & 6).

·         Finkel, I. L. (2008) Finkel, ed. pp. 16-32.

·         LeBlanc, M (2006) “Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics” In Salen, K., The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. MIT Press, pp. 439-459.

·         Masters, J. The Online Guide to Traditional Games, [online] Available at: < http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Royal-Game-Ur.htm > [Accessed 8^th December 2011].

·         Murray, H. J. R. (1952) A History of Board Games Other Than Chess. pp. 19-23.