Royal Game of Ur!
Hail, mortals!
Just a very quick blog here to explain the Royal Game of Ur, and some possible iterations of it. Because apparently most of us aren't including enough content from Critical Games Studies in our blogs.
The Royal Game of Ur originates from the ancient era of th Middle East, with the earliest boards discovered in Iraq, and being dated before 2600 BC. This game involves an oddly shaped board, seven counters per player, and a number of dice. The game is designed for two players, and is played using four four-sided dice (4D4), or four-sided throwing sticks. These dice or sticks operate on a binary system; so two of the four sides are marked, and each of these marks counts as one when the die lands on it. Thus, the maximum number of moves is four, and the lowest number of moves is zero.
This is how the game plays (by one set of rules; the true rules of the ancient Egypt version are unknown):
The first player (decided by highest roll) rolls his dice and can move that number of spaces this turn. The start and end spaces of the board are on either side of the narrow "bridge" near the centre. Each players starts and ends his pieces on his own side of the board, but must move up the middle of the board to get to the end spaces from the starting spaces. In this centre of the board, passing or landing on an enemy piece will destroy it, returning it to it's owner's control, where they have to start the piece again from the start. The first player to get all of his pieces through the board wins. The Rosetta squares you can see every four spaces on the board are special squares; these give the piece immunity to attack, and allows the player another roll of the dice for another move on his turn.
The game has evolved over the millennia, and a modified version involving only five pieces per player, and where the end of the board in "unravelled", making the game faster and more exciting by extending the area of combat.
That's all for now, mortals, I may update this later when I have a little more time to research.
For now, Hail the Emperor, and never, NEVER download Babylon onto your computer.
I'm not sure that it's accurate to say that the game is Egyptian in origin: I may have introduced some confusion by saying that the game boards excavated from the site at Ur, in Mesopotamia, are older that the pyramids at Giza, in Egypt.
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