Ancient Games Book

I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on.

The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game.

After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape.  So I grabbed the old throwing sticks I made from an actual stick in the yard, and they were much easier to handle.  Sure, they won't be 100% perfectly balanced, but any kids from ancient times would have been able to make their own, just as imperfect.  So, we used my sticks for the last round.

The pages are thick cardboard slabs, so each page opens up to a game board over a foot long, with fine artwork for each one.  There was a final page with historical notes and alternate rules.  These rules came either by finding similar boards with specific differences, or interpretations of the same boards by different scholars.  We really don't know exactly how these games were played at the time of their creation, but I think the reconstructed rules are viable.

Except for Mehen.

We started with that one, because it looked simple.  Just another race to the center game, like the Game of Goose with its hundreds of variations, thousands of years later.  But the rules for this one just didn't cover what actually happens.  

Do you race to get one chip to the center first, or do you have to get all chips there before starting them home again?  If it's the latter, the center isn't big enough to hold all those pieces.  So, maybe you get all chips to the middle, then start rolling 1s to put them back in play to get back home, to launch your "lion", which can then finally capture opponent pieces.

The rolls themselves were weird.  You keep moving until you roll a one, but don't move on that one, you keep track of all those unused ones so you can use them later to get pieces into the center by exact count.  Bleah.  That felt clunky.  How about using all your rolls and doing away with the exact count rule.  That balances out without all the malarkey.  Also, in Senet (and in Yut covered elsewhere) you make all your rolls THEN decide how to use them.  So I might get a 3-4-4-1, then decide which pieces to move, rather than rolling 3, moving a piece 3, rolling 4, moving a piece 4, and so on.  But to make it different, we went with the more-or-less separate rolls.

For such a simple game, no amount of reading the written rules to fix the confusion.  We will probably write our own.  A big oversight: the spaces with pictures on them really should mean something.