Royal Game of Ur

How to play the Royal Game of Ur

Each side takes seven pieces and runs them round a track of twenty squares. Four dice settle how far, and every one of them scores either nothing or one, so a roll is nought to four. The spread is not flat: a two turns up on six of the sixteen equally likely throws, a one or a three on eight of them, and the blank throw and the full one once apiece. The throw is made by the server rather than by either player, so nobody has to trust a hand.

A throw is not an instruction. You choose which of your seven takes it, and that choice is where a race turns into a decision. A roll of nothing loses the turn. Five squares carry a rosette, and landing on one buys another throw.

The middle row is the only ground both sides walk, which makes it the only place a capture can happen. Land on an opponent standing there and their counter goes back to the hand it came from, to start the track again. The rosette in the middle of that row is the exception: nothing standing on it can be touched, which is why both of you want it. Bring all seven round and off the far end before your opponent does and the game is yours. That is Finkel’s reconstruction, and it is what a new board is set out with.

Six reconstructions, and the one we wrote ourselves

The tablet that survives describes how the game was played. It is not a rulebook, and those are not the same artefact: an account tells you how a game went, a rulebook tells you what you may do. So every Ur anybody sits down to is a reconstruction resting on a description, which is the honest reason there is more than one of them. It is also why there is a sixth here that is ours. No rule came down to us, only something describing the gameplay, which is why we wanted rules of our own.

The tablet fixes the dice and the shape of the idea and leaves the rest open, so the people who study the game have drawn different boards. James Masters runs seven pieces down a sixteen square path bent like a Z, throwing three dice where a throw of nothing counts as the highest, with rosettes that shape the geometry and protect nobody. Blitz deals five pieces on that same route and pays another throw for every capture, so one turn can take a game. Dmitry Skiriuk stretches the route to twenty three squares that snake through both home rosettes and then run down the middle to leave. H. J. R. Murray, writing in 1952, went furthest: twenty seven squares, entered by your own chute and left by your opponent’s, and nowhere on it is safe.

Ours sits in the chooser as House rules. It runs Murray’s twenty seven squares, gives a rosette its shelter again and takes away the extra throw, and then it reads the carvings the board is decorated with. A ring turns a throw of nothing into five for whatever stands on it, so the throw that normally forfeits the turn becomes the longest step on the board. A jagged square arms a multiplier for your next throw, two times it or three, declared before you throw and spent whether it pays or not. B1, the first square of the shared middle row, holds a counter the first time its route crosses it, and pays another throw for an exact landing on the second crossing. An eye is a fortress: the piece standing on one is neither taken nor passed until you have thrown against its holder and beaten them, and a tie belongs to the counter standing still. Lose that contest and the way opens on your next attempt, so a fortress is a delay rather than a wall. Only a piece setting out from a jagged square walks past an eye as though it were not there.

You can see every one of them now. The rings, the jagged squares, B1 and the eyes are drawn on the board whichever reconstruction you sit down to, each told apart by its own shape rather than by colour. On the other five they are decoration and the board says nothing about them, because telling somebody playing Finkel that a ringed square moves a counter five would be a lie about the game in front of them. You pick your reconstruction before the board is set out: when you make the table for a friend, or in the bar above the board on one screen and against the computer. Each version includes its own route, its own dice and its own answer to whether anywhere is safe.

Writing a sixth ruleset is easy and trusting one is not, so each of the six has a computer opponent behind it that reads the ruleset off the table and plays to that. Every one was sat opposite before it was offered to anybody, which is the whole of what the owner means by "I have play tested every game that ships." That is one reason the seat is there at all.

The rules are younger than the board by two thousand years

The board survived. Nothing saying what to do with it did, for most of that time. A Babylonian scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu wrote his tablet in 177 BC, and Irving Finkel of the British Museum read the game out of it in the early 1980s. That tablet is the reason this game can be played at all, and it is why Senet, the Egyptian game older still, cannot be: Senet boards are found in numbers and nothing describing how it went is. The board is attested. What we sit down to is a reconstruction. Both are worth saying out loud.

A game board out of a royal tomb

Leonard Woolley dug the Royal Cemetery at Ur through the 1920s and brought up five worn boards, giving the game its name in 1928. One of them, inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, is held by the British Museum. Its shape is unmistakable: twenty squares in three blocks, a wide end, a narrow bridge, a short far end, with a rosette on five of them. Boards cut to the same plan are found far beyond Mesopotamia, which tells you this ancient game travelled the same roads the traders did.

The Royal Standard of Ur is a different object, and nobody knows what it was for

People looking for this game often land on the Royal Standard of Ur instead, and the two are not the same thing. The standard came out of the same cemetery on the same dig, in the same shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, and it sits in the same museum. It is a hollow box with a panel on each long side, one conventionally called war and the other peace. What it was for is not known. Woolley called it a standard because he guessed it had been carried on a pole, and others have suggested it was the sounding box of an instrument. The board is the thing anybody can still sit down at. The standard is the thing nobody can account for.

The age of the Royal Game of Ur is two dates, not one

Ask how old the Royal Game of Ur is and the honest answer is two numbers. The British Museum dates the boards between 2600 and 2400 BCE, which makes the game board roughly 4,500 years old. The text is very much younger, written in 177 BC. Age here means two dates with twenty three centuries between them, and the modern habit of calling this a 4,500 year old game dates the board rather than the account of how it was played.

Why the Royal Game of Ur matters

Plenty of board games are older. What makes this one special is that it is the oldest anybody still knows how to play. Every older game is a board without instructions, a shape in a case with the reasoning gone. Ur is the point where an excavation stops being a display and turns into a game you can lose to a friend on a Tuesday evening.

More in it than a race game should have

For a game that looks like a sprint, Ur holds a surprising amount of strategy. Every throw is a choice of which piece to move rather than a result you accept. The middle row is shared ground, so anything left standing there can be sent home by the other player, while a rosette hands out another throw and, under Finkel, a square nobody can take you on.

Holding the rosette in the middle of that shared row is usually the whole plan: it is the safest square on the board and it denies the other player the one place they most want to stand. Racing every piece forward at once is how a beginner loses. That is enough tension to keep a small and dedicated following: players who not only keep playing an ancient game but write new versions of the rules for it.

Playing Ur online, with someone who is not in the room

Making a table here takes one click and gives you a link to send. Whoever opens it sits down opposite you, and neither of you needs an account. That is the part a display case cannot do: two people around one board while many miles apart, taking turns in the evening the way the counters were pushed around in ancient Mesopotamia.

Many of the people who go looking for this game are the only person they know who wants it. A link travels further than a boxed set, and it settles the awkward part of a reconstructed game: every legal step is marked as you go, so nobody has to referee the route from memory.

Replicas, printables, and the fastest route to a game

Most people looking for this game end up hunting for a replica to buy or a printable board to cut out, and both are good things to want. A replica is a real object and a printable is a fine craft afternoon.

This is only the quick route. The board is drawn here, the throws are made by the server rather than by a player who might be tempted, and the route is drawn for you as your piece walks it, which settles most of the arguing a reconstructed game invites. It is what you open when the glue has not dried, or when the person you want at the board is a long way off.

The people who still make their own

Ur is not a museum piece that only historians touch. It keeps a small and devoted following, and the pleasing thing about that following is how much of it builds. The game has a page on Facebook where people post the boards they have made themselves, and they are lovely: somebody’s careful inlay next to somebody else’s felt tip on card. Others go the other way and redraw the rules, tightening the original, changing the number of dice, lengthening the route. The sixth ruleset in our chooser came out of the same instinct.

What was dug out of a tomb has become a game with a living following. Sitting down at a board this old is not reviving anything, it is joining something that never quite stopped.