I've slipped with blog postings as the course has advanced so now it is time to sit down and catch up on what I should have been posting on a regular basis.
So here it is, my blog post on Ancient Games
The Ancient Game of Ur
Recently in lectures we had a look at the Royal Game of Ur, The game was discovered in Sumeria, in the royal tombs at Ur and is suspected to be from pre 2600 BC, making it possibly the oldest board game to ever exist!
The original board was not found with playing pieces however others were found and contained 2 sets of counters which were black and white (indicating it was a 2 player game) and 3 dice which are tetrahedral in shape (triangular in less fancy terms)
Due to the age and discovery of the game board and pieces it is hard to imagine how it was originally played, there were no rules found with the board, there are a number of different sets of rules which have been created based on the layout of the board and the number of pieces, we played a few games using a rule set we were provided however the rules weren’t 100% clear to us so we interpreted them as best we could and had a go at playing.
The rule set we used was that all pieces remained off the board at the start and your objective was to get your 7 counters to the end of the board before your opponent, we learned that you could stack counters on top on each other, you could roll again after landing on a certain square and that you could knock your opponent off the board sending that piece back to the start.
The results were interesting, it certainly seemed as if it had been cleverly thought out and the rules did seem to work with the board and pieces however personally I felt as if the rules back in 2600 BC could have been slightly different as they may not of had some of the standards we see in board games today, for all we know it might not have been turn based back then!
Senet
Another game we played was Senet now I have already told you that Ur is possibly the oldest game in existence; however Senet begs to prove me wrong with evidence dating it back to 3100 BC!
Senet is similar in some ways to Ur; perhaps Senet was the inspiration for Ur, you have 1 board, 7 pieces of 2 colours and dice, the board again hints that you must get from 1 side to the other and this time all your counters start on the board. Towards the end of the “path” that is the game board are special squares which upon landing on give either positive effects or negative ones, a couple of the squares are really quite nasty forcing you to move pieces back to the start!
Onto the rules, all the counters are placed onto the board in a certain fashion depending on the rule set, you move by rolling a dice and upon landing either a 1 4 or 5 you get an additional roll which you can use on either the same piece you just moved or on a different one entirely, once you have 2 pieces next to each other they are considered safe, when safe these pieces can’t be swapped by your opponent as this is what happens when you land on the same square, if you are able to get 3 pieces adjacent to each other you are then not able to be passed allowing you to tactically block your opponent.
The rules were very good however some misunderstanding on our part led to the game ending very quickly. All in all it was very interesting to play these games which have been around for a truly incredible amount of time.
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