A game board made of wood and shell, along with tokens and dice. Courtesy of the British Museum.
We've got a good impression of how the Game of Ur is played - you try to get to a goal by rolling dice, capturing your opponent's pieces on the way. It's comparable to Backgammon.
There are several things I like about it.
- It's really old. The above board dates to ~2500BC, making it about 1000 years older than the scandalous copper merchant Ea-Nasir, and over 3000 years older than chess.
- It was widespread, with evidence of play having been found everywhere between Crete and Sri Lanka, sometimes on intricate boards made of expensive materials, sometimes just graffitied on a dirt floor. This game was popular, spanning across nations and classes.
- For movement range, the game used four triangular pyramid-shaped dice, each with two painted tips, so a single roll could cumulatively score anywhere from zero to four. Why not just use a single object instead, such as a five-sided spinning top? Possibly because using four dice creates a normal distribution - high and low values become much less likely, gameplay becomes more predictable, and upsets become dramatic events. That's modern games design! That's how Fire Emblem's probability tables work, baby!
- The board has two "safe" areas with an "unsafe" road between them. You can wait for a good roll to try to traverse the road quickly, but if you wait too long your pieces will pile up in the starting safe area, and you'll be forced to make a bad move. The tension of waiting, of learning when to punish an eager opponent and when to not risk over-extending reminds me a lot of modern fighting games. The Game of Ur is simple by modern standards - you usually only have a couple of viable moves per turn - but the strategy design and the emotions the gameplay evokes feel timeless.
I'd love to see some modern interpretations of the Game of Ur, as well as other ancient games. Egyptian board games in particular are worth investigating - look up Hounds and jackals or Mehen for some stunning board design!
