The Royal Game of Ur — Build and Play the Oldest Board Game

The Royal Game of Ur is about 4,600 years old — a race game from Mesopotamia. Its rules were lost until Irving Finkel of the British Museum read them off a clay tablet. Watch him teach the game below.

Draw the 20-square board: a block 4 squares long and a block 2 squares long, both 3 rows high, joined along the middle row by a bridge of 2 squares.

Paint a rosette flower on the five special squares shown on surviving boards, including the one in the centre of the shared middle lane. These are the lucky, safe squares.

Pinch four small pyramids (tetrahedra) from clay. On each die, mark just TWO of the four corners with a dab of paint; leave the other two blank.

Make 14 flat round counters — seven of one colour and seven of another, one set for each player. Let the dice and counters dry hard.

Each player runs seven counters along their own track: up their side rows, across the shared middle lane, and off the far end. First to bear off all seven wins.

On your turn, throw all four dice and count how many MARKED corners point up. That number, from 0 to 4, is how many squares you may move one piece.

Land exactly on a rosette square and you are safe from capture AND you get to roll again. The rosettes are what make the game race and swing.

Land on an enemy piece in the shared middle lane (not on a rosette) and it is knocked back off the board to start its journey again.

Tally forty throws of the four dice. A total of two comes up far more often than zero or four — the dice are quietly loaded toward the middle.

The four tetrahedral dice are the heart of the game and a perfect probability lesson. Each die has two marked corners and two blank, so landing marked-up or blank-up is a fair 50/50 coin flip. Rolling four of them is four coin flips at once, and the number of 'heads' follows the binomial distribution: the ways to get 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 marks are 1 : 4 : 6 : 4 : 1 out of 16 equally likely outcomes. So a roll of 2 (six chances in sixteen) turns up most often, a 1 or a 3 fairly often, and a 0 or a 4 (one chance in sixteen each) is rare and lucky — a long move you can almost never count on. That gently loaded randomness is exactly what gives the game its rhythm of steady shuffles and sudden dashes. The board itself was found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, and the game belongs to the 'race game' family alongside Backgammon and Ludo, where players rush pieces around a track helped by the safe, bonus rosette squares. Because Finkel could translate its rules from a Babylonian tablet, it is the oldest board game we can still play exactly as it was meant to be played.