Hounds and Jackals

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move.

Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there.

The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since different boards have been found with different connecting lines.  Some boards even had lines where you would cross over to the opponent's side of the board, which could open up additional rules for captures.  If a chute sent my piece to the other side, I can see it being bumped back to the start.  

Again, they could easily have added an extra curved line to show how the pieces wrap around the bottom of the board.  But this was just a fun little race game.  I am tempted to mock up the variations and see how they feel.