These 10 Ancient Games Are Still Fun to Play

[Judi Lynn]

JULY 16, 2024

10 MIN READ

Find new ways to fill the long summer days with these quick primers on 10 ancient games

BY STEPHANIE PAPPAS



Game box for playing Senet and Twenty Squares, circa 1635–1458 B.C.E.
Penta Springs Limited/Alamy Stock Photo

Board games might involve a race to a finish line, as in Sorry! or that ubiquitous first board game for kids, Candyland. Or they might entail a strategic battle for dominance, as in chess or checkers. Some have simple rules (think Clue), while others have a headache-inducing learning curve (such as Feudeum, in which players control a set of medieval characters who must survive in a complex economy).

Whether you like to while away long hours with Monopoly or a quick Snakes and Ladders is more your speed, you’re taking part in a tradition that stretches back millennia. Here are 10 of the oldest board games and a quick primer on how to play each one. With these games, you may find new (ancient) ways to fill the long summer days.



An inlaid game board and playing pieces discovered in a tomb at the southern Iraqi site of Ur. They date back to the second millennium B.C.E.Zev Radovan/Alamy Stock Photo

1. THE ROYAL GAME OF UR
First played: As early as 2600 B.C.E.

Who played it: Ancient Mesopotamians. The game also spread around Central Asia, from Iran to India.

The backstory: No one knows what the people who invented the Royal Game of Ur called it. Modern archaeologists named this game after the site in southern Iraq where the boards and pieces were found in the 1920s. The game was played until at least around 177 B.C.E., but it may have persisted into the 20th century among the Jewish community of Kochi, India, says Walter Crist, an archaeologist and lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who studies ancient games. Some snippets of the rules are known from ancient texts that describe the game’s distinctive I-shaped board but don’t say the name of the game, which, Crist notes, “would have been nice.”

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-ancient-games-that-are-still-fun-to-play/