Ancient Games - Ur and Senet

Been a couple of weeks since I've done a blog post... 2 reasons for this, first I didn't want to keep doing rant-style blog posts and decided to wait until I had something serious to blog about and second, work in other modules has kept me quite busy so I kept putting this off in place of them. Anyways, here we go about this blog post on the Royal Game of Ur and the ancient game of Senet.

Ur
First, let's talk about the Royal Game of Ur, a game that was discovered in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The game dates back to the first Dynasty of Ur which is at least 2600BC, this makes Ur possibly one of the oldest board games ever discovered. As the game is as old as it is and the fact that they were found with little else explaining the game, the rules of the game of Ur are unknown with experts establishing a set of rules that are plausible and playable, even so, these are mostly core rules and the way in which people interpret them and play them changes how the game is played.

In our lecture on Thursday afternoon we were given a copy of the game board and a set of rules with which were to play along with. The general objective of the game is get all 7 of your counters to the end of the game board and have them escape, your opponent is trying to do the same thing, making it a race game. Other gameplay elements include rosette squares which keep your counter safe and give you an extra turn, the ability to knock an opponent's counter off the game board by landing on the same square as them and the ability to double up your counters if they land on the same square. The rest of the game though was down to our interpretation.

You may think, 'How? The game is clearly established' and to some degree that is correct, but the fact of the matter is that upon beginning play, several versions of the game were being played - some of us were playing the game where you ALWAYS got an extra turn upon landing on a rosette, even if you had just got one, others were playing it so that if you had a single versus a double you would defeat the double as opposed to only removing one counter... So as you can see, without clearly defined rule clarifications the game can branch out - and this was a well learnt lesson in the lecture - the mechanics of games are most likely already established, the question is how you use them; it is this that determines how games play out, etc.

Oh, and I won at our game of Ur, beating Tom Weaver in the last turn and at the last second - just thought I'd let you know...

Senet
Senet is yet another ancient game, many discoveries have been made relating to it in numerous places but it has been established that the game dates back to at least 3100BC, so as you can see, it's even older than Ur, possibly making it THE oldest board game ever discovered. The game is Egyptian and functions in a similar vein to Ur in the it is a race game where the objective is to remove all seven of your counters before your opponent - another allusion to how the mechanics in games don't change, just how they are used.

This time, the board is completely different, and the way of play is different. All your counters start on the board (as opposed to Ur where they start of the board and need to be added) and when you move and land on an opponents square you swap with them as opposed to knocking them off. Next, if you have two counters adjacent to one another they are 'safe' preventing them from being swapped and also if you manage to get 3 counters in a row they are unable to be passed at all, preventing the opponent from moving close to the finish. There are still 'special' tiles in the game but they all have different purposes and features (though I can't remember what they were at this time...) Finally, if you roll a 1, 4 or 5 you get to roll again and add the new number to your current roll and with this allows you to split the amount you can move between more than 1 counter.

Again, several versions of the game ended up being played as certain rules are left ambiguous (do you get endless additions to your movement number, etc). Personally, I both preferred this game to Ur and disliked it - I feel the ability to make 3 tiles impenetrable a good implementation of strategy, but at the same time it could hinder the player so much that they have no way of ever getting around it.

This time to game between me and Tom Weaver ended in a draw as we ran out of time... though I was winning at the time we finished... just putting it out there...

Conclusion
So there we have it, 2 ancient board games that we have been introduced to as a part of our course that the chances are I otherwise wouldn't have played. While the games themselves had there moments of fun, I probably wouldn't have gained much from playing them if it hadn't been for the rules thing - it taught me the valuable lesson I mentioned above: Use mechanics that are already established in new and different ways rather than over-complicating things and trying to make your own.

So, anyways 'til next time - that's all folks!