Royal Game of Ur and Senet

Hello all

It's been quite a long time since I last posted.

Today, I'm going to talk about some ancient game that I got to look at the other day.

The games in question are known as Royal Game of Ur and Senet. These are two of the oldest games in existence and are both similar to each, since both of them are a race game.

The goal of Royal Game of Ur is to get all of your pieces to the end of the board before your opponent does, by tactically moving with what you roll on a D4 each turn. You can also take other people's pieces in order to send their pieces back to the start, and additionally you can create stacks in order to stop your opponent from being able to take your pieces if his stacks are not as big as yours.
Senet's goal is very much the same in that you need to get all your pieces off the board before your opponent.You could also land on panels that caused different effects throughout the game.

Over the years, Royal Game of Ur's board design got changed so that it was only one straight line to the end, rather than doing the same route pattern as in the beginning of the game. Also Senet got a few rule tweaks to balance some of the game play.

Out of these two games, I believe Royal Game of Ur to be more enjoying, as it has a lot of tactic thinking and movement within the game, and also it is quite a fast pace game, so you can play the game quite frequently before it starts to get boring. I think one of the major downsides to the game, is that it can be quite unforgiving, especially with the idea of taking pieces and also being able to take stacks of pieces that are lesser than the one taking the pieces. It is a good thing that you can take people's pieces, however sending them back to the beginning is quite harsh, especially when the player gets a big stack sent back to the start.