Senet Board

Cut a hardwood board to 330 x 120 x 20 mm. That gives thirty 30 mm squares in a 3 x 10 grid with a 15 mm margin all round.

Plane the top face flat and sand through 120 then 220 grit. Carve the grid into a surface that is already finished — sanding afterwards rounds over your crisp edges.

Mark out three rows of ten 30 mm squares with the marking gauge and a square. Thirty squares exactly — the number is fixed across the whole two-thousand-year history of the game.

Cut each grid line 2 mm deep with a V-gouge, working with the grain where possible. Cut every line in the same direction for a consistent look.

Carve a small arrow at each end of the three rows showing the boustrophedon path — along row one, back along row two, along row three. The path reverses each row; without the arrows a new player will read it as three parallel lanes.

Carve symbols into the five special squares near the end of the path — squares 26 to 30 in play order. These are the named houses that every surviving decorated board marks in some form.

Split four sticks 120 x 12 x 5 mm, each rounded on one face and flat on the other. Sand them smooth. Four sticks with two distinguishable faces is the Egyptian randomiser — dice as we know them came much later.

Darken the rounded face of each stick so the two sides read instantly from across a table. A throw is scored by counting how many light faces land up.

Make ten pawns 25 mm tall — five of one shape, five of another, one set light and one dark. Five per player is the common configuration, though surviving sets vary between five and seven.

Wipe on boiled linseed oil, leave 20 minutes, wipe off the surplus. Two coats. Oil sinks into the carved lines and makes the grid read darker than the field.

Pick one published reconstruction, write its rules on a card, and keep the card with the board. Because the rules are reconstructed rather than known, a set without a stated rule sheet will be played differently every time it comes out of the box.

We have the board. We do not have the rules. This is the honest and important part. No Egyptian text sets out how to play senet. The rule sets circulating today — including the ones in most museum shops — are 20th-century reconstructions, principally by Timothy Kendall (1978) and Peter Piccione (1980), with an earlier attempt by R. C. Bell. They are built by inference from scattered depictions and textual fragments spanning more than a thousand years, over which the game itself almost certainly changed. Anyone who tells you "the rules of senet" without that caveat is overselling.

What we do know. The board is thirty squares in three rows of ten. Movement was decided by throwing sticks or knucklebones, not dice, with the score read from how many faces landed one way up. Two players moved a set of pawns — five to seven each — along a path that reverses direction each row. The final squares carry names: the House of Beauty, the House of Water, the House of the Three Truths. The House of Water was evidently bad to land on.

From pastime to funerary text. Senet is attested from the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods and stayed in play for roughly two millennia. Over that span it acquired religious weight: by the New Kingdom the journey across the board was read as the soul's passage through the underworld, and scenes of the deceased playing senet against an unseen opponent appear in tomb painting and in the Book of the Dead. Four boards were buried with Tutankhamun. A game had become equipment for the afterlife.

Boustrophedon. The back-and-forth path is named from the Greek for "as the ox turns in ploughing", and the same pattern appears in early Greek inscriptions, where lines of text alternate direction. It is an efficient way to fill a rectangle without lifting and returning, whether you are ploughing, writing, or moving a pawn.

Why reconstruct at all. An unplayable board is an object; a played board is a practice. Reconstruction is a legitimate scholarly exercise as long as it is labelled — which is why the rule card in step 11 matters. Write down which reconstruction you are using, and you are being straight about what is known and what is inferred.