Two best board games of the ancient world

Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013.

Senet

This ancient Egyptian Senet board is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain

Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II, Senet is one of the earliest known board games. Archaeological and artistic evidence suggest it was played as early as 3100 B.C., when Egypt’s First Dynasty was just beginning to fade from power.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, upper-class members of Egyptian society played Senet using ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today. Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.

Senet boards were long and lithe, consisting of 30 squares laid out in three parallel rows of ten. Two players received equal numbers of gaming tokens, usually between five to seven, and raced to send all of their pieces to the end of the board. Rather than rolling dice to determine the number of squares moved, participants threw casting sticks or bones.

The Royal Game of Ur

This roughly 4,500-year-old board features shell plaque squares encircled by strips of lapis lazuli and decorated with intricate floral and geometric designs.

Researchers often struggle to determine the rules of games played millennia ago. But thanks to an unassuming cuneiform tablet translated by British Museum curator Irving Finkel during the 1980s, experts have a detailed set of instructions for the Royal Game of Ur, or Twenty Squares.

The roughly 4,500-year-old game’s modern rediscovery dates to Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavation of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur’s Royal Cemetery between 1922 and 1934.

Smithsonian