Ancient games

Ancient Games

Games have been around for a long time as it is natural for humans to seek playing activities. (See notes on natural funitivity to explore more as to why playing games has always been important to humans.)

Some of the oldest known games (such as chess) are still played while others are forgotten.

In this post I will give a brief description of one of the ancient games I have learnt of:

The Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur is an ancient racing game where two players need to move a number of tokens across and safely off the board before their opponent.

Several examples of this game were excavated from the Royal Cemetery of Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1926 -1930.

The layout of the gaming board consists of what Becker calls a “larger ‘body’” (4x3 squares) and a “smaller body” (2x3 squares), joined by a connecting “narrow ‘bridge’ of two squares” (2x1). 

- Becker in Finkel, ed. (2008) p. 11

Becker also notes the five rosette squares are a consistent feature of game boards from other times and other regions (p. 11).

The game had different variations, however all were based on the same concept.

One of the versions used the following board:

Each player has 5 pieces and starts at the top and bottom rows respectively. Players have to take turn to roll a number of 4 sided dice, and based on their roll score, they move their pieces onto the board, or move a piece which is already on the board ahead up to 4 spaces towards the next rosette tile (determined by the rolls). The first row that players move their pieces onto are safe from the opponent as no player interaction takes place there, however as soon as they go beyond the first rosette square, players must race their pieces along the shared middle row where they can knock each other's pieces off the board and thus have to start that piece's progress from scratch.

When a piece landed on a rosette square, the player gets a few benefits: They get an extra turn, their piece may not be knocked off while in that square and their piece prevents the opponent from landing on the rosette square.

In the end The Royal Game of Ur is a luck based game (due to the dice) with a bit of meaningful (and yet obvious) decisions to be taken by the players based on their rolls, however the game is easy to get into and it is amusing to play simply to watch the dramatic action caused by the competition from the middle row.