Senet

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, we ran through a game of Senet.  It feels like a precursor to backgammon.  Can't escape that.  I realize that these are artist rendering of actual relics, but I would have put some tiny arrows at the top right side and middle left to show how the spaces flow around the edges.

The base rules say to start with the pieces on the board in an alternating pattern, but that does give a tiny advantage to one player.  The main variation says to roll to get your pieces onto the board -- maybe we will try that next time.  Instead of capturing a piece or sending it back to start by landing on it, you swap that piece with your piece.  So if you landed on a piece with a four, you move your piece ahed 4 and send that piece back 4.  We called that "being bumped".  To me, the most interesting piece of strategy was that putting two of your pieces in a row makes them immune from being bumped, and three in a row is a barrier impassable to your opponent.

The five final spaces give the game some flavor more.  5th from the end: you have to stop here on exact count to continue at all.  4th from end: the river sends you back to start.  And the last 3 spaces let you leave the board by exact count, as in backgammon.

The rolls themselves had the same feel as in Yut, but in this case you keep rolling until you get a 2 or 3, then decide how to split up those rolls.  It feels like there should be a maximum of 5 rolls, though.  Even though I jotted down the longer sets of rolls, it starts feeling silly after 5.

The game ran for about 20 minutes along the way: being so stuck that the only piece I could move sent my piece back to the start, or having a blockade of mine right behind a blockade of hers, or using four 1s to move a protected pair ahead by two.

The only glitch that kept happening is that when Anne would roll a 1-1-1 (example), and move 3 spaces to bump one of my pieces, she moved my piece back the full three spaces, when it felt to me like three moves of one, so my piece should only have been bumped back one.

I can see playing this one a lot more, since we do get in the mood for backgammon every now and then, and I keep wanting to explore backgammon variations from around the world.