Royal Game of Ur

## Real Life

One of the five gameboards found by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, now held in the British Museum

### Variants

Irving Finkel and Damian Walker rulesets (original ruleset is less known)

### Requirements

Android 4.1 minimal

The ***Royal Game of Ur***, also known as the ***Game of Twenty Squares*** or simply the ***Game of Ur***, is a two-player strategy race board game that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and even Sri Lanka.

## Historical notes

The Game of Ur was popular across the Middle East and boards for it have been found in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and Crete. Four gameboards bearing a very close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the funeral chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun. These boards came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces and many had senet boards on the reverse sides so that the same board could be used to play either game and merely had to be flipped over. The game was popular among all social classes. A graffito version of the game carved with a sharp object, possibly a dagger, was discovered on one of the human-headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II (721–705 BC) in the city of Khorsabad.

The Game of Ur eventually acquired superstitious significance and the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balāṭu provides vague predictions for the players' futures if they land on certain spaces, such as "You will find a friend", "You will become powerful like a lion", or "You will draw fine beer". People saw relationships between a player's success in the game and his or her success in real life. Seemingly random events such as landing on a certain square were interpreted as messages from deities, ghosts of deceased ancestors, or from a person's own soul.

It is unclear what led to the Game of Ur's eventual decline during late antiquity. One theory holds that it evolved into backgammon; whereas another holds that early forms of backgammon eclipsed the Game of Ur in popularity, causing players to eventually forget about the older game. At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was apparently introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants. Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II. The Kochi version of the game had twenty squares, just like the original Mesopotamian version, but each player had twelve pieces rather than seven and the placement of the twenty squares was slightly different.

### Modern rediscovery

The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered five gameboards of the Game of Ur during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934. Because the game was first discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, it became known as the "Royal Game of Ur", but later archaeologists uncovered other copies of the game from various other locations across the Middle East. Each of the boards discovered by Wooley date to around 3000 BC. All five boards were of an identical type, but they were made of different materials and had different decorations. Woolley reproduced images of two of these boards in his 1949 book, The First Phases. One of these is a relatively simple set with a background composed of discs of shell with blue or red centers set in wood-covered bitumen. The other is a more elaborate one completely covered with shell plaques, inlaid with red limestone and lapis lazuli. Other gameboards are often engraved with images of animals.

## Gameplay

The Game of Ur is a race game and it is probably a direct ancestor of the tables, or backgammon, family of games, which are still played today. The Game of Ur is played using two sets of seven checker-like game pieces. One set of pieces are white with five black dots and the other set is black with five white dots. The gameboard is composed of two rectangular sets of boxes, one containing three rows of four boxes each and the other containing three rows of two boxes each, joined together by a "narrow bridge" of two boxes. The gameplay involves elements of both luck and strategy. Movements are determined by rolling a set of four-sided, pyramid-shaped dice. Two of the four corners of each die are marked and the other two are not, giving each die an equal chance of landing with a marked or unmarked corner facing up. The number of marked ends facing upwards after a roll of the dice indicates how many spaces a player may move during that turn. A single game can last up to half an hour and can be very intense.

The object of the game is for a player to move all seven of his or her pieces along the course (two proposed versions of which are shown at right) and off the board before his or her opponent. On all surviving gameboards, the two sides of the board are always identical with each other, indicating that the two sides of the board belong to each player. When a piece is on one of the player's own squares, it is safe from capture, but, when it is on one of the eight squares in the middle of the board, the opponent's pieces may capture it by landing on the same space, sending the piece back off the board so that it must restart the course from the beginning. This means there are six "safe" squares and eight "combat" squares. There can never be more than one piece on a single square at any given time, so having too many pieces on the board at once can impede a player's mobility.

When a player rolls a number using the dice, he or she may choose to move any of his or her pieces on the board or add a new piece to the board if he or she still has pieces that have not entered the game. A player is not required to capture a piece every time he or she has the opportunity. Nonetheless, players are required to move a piece whenever possible, even if it results in an unfavorable outcome. All surviving gameboards have a colored rosette in the middle of the center row. According to Finkel's reconstruction, if a piece is located on the space with the rosette, it is safe from capture. In order to remove a piece from the board, a player must roll exactly the number of spaces remaining until the end of the course plus one. If the player rolls a number any higher or lower than this number, he or she may not remove the piece from the board.

## Gameplay in *Ancient Games*

The Royal Game of Ur is the seconda game published by the Ancient Games collection. It featured in total 42 Avatars, 28 Boards and 6 Dices before the 1.5 version. The new 1.5 version features a total of 125 boards (including variants), 37 pawns, 6 dice and 42 avatars.

### Walker ruleset (all versions)

The game starts with the seven pawns per player and three four-faced dices. The score of the dice is obtained by counting the number of dice that have an upward golden summit.

A pawn is protected if it is on a starred square, and cannot be captured. The player can move a pawn if it ends up on an empty square, or a square occupied on an enemy pawn (provided it isn't protected by a star), while, instead, it is impossible if it arrives on an ally pawn. Captured pawns are sent back to the start.

When in the last squares, the player needs an exact throw of the dice in order to take a pawn out. This makes him/her score a point. The first player that scores seven points, taking out all of his/her pawns, is the victor.

### Finkel ruleset (since v1.5)

The Finkel ruleset presents significative differences to the Walker ruleset:

* There are four dices instead of three.
* Only the central row is shared between the players.
* If, after a throw, all dice have their golden summit upwards, it makes 4, and the player can move the pawn by 4, as well as throw again.
* If, after a throw, *no* dice have their golden summit upwards, it makes 0, and the player loses their turn.

## Trivia

* At the moment, the game is available in six languages: French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish.
* The game is actually available only on Android, but it is soon to be available on iOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows 10 reccomended) and (probably) Xbox One, making the game completely cross-form, thanks to the one-account system powered by Cloud.
* One archaeological dig uncovered twenty-one white balls alongside a set of the Game of Ur. It is believed that these balls were probably used for placing wagers. According to the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balāṭu, whenever a player skips one of the boxes marked with a rosette, he or she must place a token in the pot. If a player lands on a rosette, he or she may take a token from the pot.

## Gallery

### Pre-v1.5

The UI (User Interface) in v1.3Main Menu in v1.4

## See also

* **Royal Game of Ur**
* Senet

 Concepts
 About

fr:Jeu royal d'Ur
it:Gioco reale di Ur
pt:Jogo Real di Ur
[[ar:
es:Juego Real de Ur