The Oldest Known Board Game
The oldest known board game dates back to about 2500 BC from the city of Ur in Sumeria. Wikipedia has a good overview of it. BoardGameGeek, like always, has a good range of versions and information. And one of the finest pages on the topic is over at A4 Games.
One of my favorite videos about this game is the elder Irving Finkel or the Royal Museum, discoverer/creator of the rule set we know of, playing YouTuber Tom Scott over here. It's from a few years ago, but I remembered getting a kick out of it back then, and seeing it again just now: it is something to watch grown men enjoying their little competition so much. And all because of this simple thing from 4500 years ago:
What I want to talk about is the fascination of this artifact, the mystery of its symbols. Different sets have been found from tombs all the way down to King Tut and the early Christian Era. A tablet of rules was found dating from 155 BC, written in cuneiform, which describes a much later and more complex version of the game. I am going to focus on this one artifact for now. Other relics of this game have been found, other game boards, some with fewer symbols; only the rosette spaces seem universal across all these game boards.
There are a lot of interpretations. It is fairly certain that this was a racing game, but we can only guess the exact track that the ancient players would have moved their pieces along. Some sets came with 3 or 4 throwing sticks, others with ancient d4 dice with two painted tips. These four binary things can generate numbers from 0 to 4. In some other cultures which also game with colored sticks, four blanks lets you move five spaces.
Here is an illustration of the basic path (from the PDF at A4 Games) with my own numbering system in green.
- throw 4 "dice" for a number between 0 and 4
- you can start a new piece on the board or move an existing piece the number shown
- if you land on an opposing piece, send it back to the start (off the board)
- roll again if you land on a rosette space
- your piece cannot be bumped if it is on a rosette space
- you need to take your men off the board by exact roll.
This leads to a surprisingly competitive game. A test run of a dozen games found only one or two that came out more than one piece apart at the end. Each player has six safe spaces that the other player cannot reach, while the entire central row (minus the rosette) is a battleground. It feels natural to move pieces on board and fill up our 1 to 4 spaces as much as we can, hoping the opponent will be forced to move to the battle strip first, so we can bump them off. But then for balance, that central, defensible rosette is only four spaces from the last safe space. So from 4 we can skip 5,6,7 and get right to that critical space 8.
It's a funny thing that happens with space 8. It is tempting to linger there, wait for opponents to move past to 9,10,11,12 and then suddenly move from 8 to send then back home. In fact, I have had games where I mentally block out an opponent on 8 after they sit there for 8 or 10 turns. Then that piece comes back to life at the worst possible time. And it is very satisfying to do this to other players. Wait for it ... forget it's even capable of movement ... then come out like a trap-door spider. Chomp. This is a very simple mechanism that adds a level of risk to the game. If space 8 is the bottleneck or stronghold space, it makes a fourth zone in the game, the 1-4 safe zone, 5-8 battle are, then the 9-12 spaces that can be dominated by the piece on 8, and the final 13-14 safe zones. That makes a surprisingly rich game for having so few spaces and rules.
But is it how the game was intended to be played?
Is anybody on Earth actually playing to Royal Game of Ur today? Heck, we don't even know the official name of the thing. I'm not going to nitpick it: we are playing some very well balanced interpretations of this game, and it serves as an excellent illustration of how a few game pieces and barely 20 squares can lead to minutes, hours ... CENTURIES ... of entertainment.
Then there is the mystery of the symbols on the spaces. The game works very well with the rosette meaning to roll again. In fact, that makes perfect sense if the highest roll is a four and the first two rosettes are separated by four spaces each. I'm afraid it does NOT make sense saying that the rosette spaces are safe, since 4 of the 5 rosette symbols are on spaces which are already on safe zones.
The only symbols remaining which might represent a safe space (no matching symbols in safe zones) are space 5 and then 7 and 10. Space 5 would make a heck of a bottleneck point, then the zones would be safe 1-4, try to take 5, the player on 5 dominates 6-8, a less heavily fought zone from 9-12, then safe 13-14. That makes the first two rosettes even more tactically perfect: on a 4 you can leap that first rosette past the hazard of 6-7, hitting the 8 and getting a boost possible deep into the safer end of the board.
But the "four fives" symbol on 7 and 10 just don't suggest "safe" to me, more likely that more than one piece can share those spaces. An interesting possibility is that if you land on either of those "four fives" spaces, you can immediately drop a second piece there, at the risk of both of them being captured, of course.
Game pieces have been found that are blank on one side and have five dots on the other side, just like the illustrations on the board itself. I suspect that spaces which show four fives probably meant that multiple (up to four?) pieces could share those special spaces.
There is a more complex game where the pieces start off blank side up and only get flipped on the weird symbol on a13 and b13 before making their way back to a1 and leaving the board there.
Was it an ancestor of backgammon? Human minds always want to make comparisons, put things in some precise order, but I would say no. If every game that ever moved pieces around a track could be the descendant of any other game that moved pieces around a track -- at that point, the comparison comes up empty. Sure any game where you go in a circular pattern and bump opponents back to the start is a lot like Parchisi or Sorry or Backgammon, but the time span here is so enormous that aside from having pieces and a board, no reasonable comparisons can be made.
Related Games:
A. A hybrid board with pieces and squares representing animals, is very well described here.
B. The most widely known variation is known simply as the Game of 20 Squares. It appears to be the same game but with a13, a14, b13 and b14 stretched out into a longer, straight stretch of battle spaces. Essentially, remove those spaces, now add 12 (rosette), 13, 14, 15, 16 (rosette) and you have the board for the game of 20. That reinforces the near certainty that the rosette means roll again, since they are on the 4, 8, 12 and 16 spots, and some lucky rolls of four can send a piece all the way down the board in a grand swoop. Now, if the original game is the same pattern compacted to take up less space, then this suggests that the original path on the original game board after square 11 was a14 (rosette), a13, 12, b13, b14 (rosette). But centuries may have passed between these game boards, so it is hard to prove any specific claims.
There are fine presentations of this game over at the Metropolitan Museum, and at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. The latter presentation has an extensive set of rules for reading the knucklebones and how the pieces represent different birds with different values, though their "simple" version is still the basic roll and move with no extra fuss. This can be found with a PDF board and rules over at A4Games.
A very neat and clear explanation of a much longer game can be found here: Going Full Finkel on the Game of Ur.
Apps:
After trying a few Android apps which were very plain, I felt the one at ancientgames.eu was the one worth keeping. The developer, Sullivan Bousiniere, has built more of an experience than anyone else, with reasonable goals, bonuses and variations; top notch graphics, unlockable dice, avatars, pawns. My favorite variation was: every 90 seconds Enlil will flood the board, removing all unprotected pieces. There is a map of Mesopotamian cities, probably even more content that I have not unlocked yet. It puts a wise and historical context around the basic game.
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