Royal Game of Ur
A race for two, and one of the oldest board games there is: a board for it in the British Museum is about four and a half thousand years old. Each of you has seven pieces to bring onto the board, along it and off the far end, and the first to bring all seven home wins. Four dice say how far a piece goes. Your two routes share the middle of the board, and that is where a piece can be captured and sent back to the start.
The board
- Twenty squares in three rows: a block of twelve, a block of six, and a bridge of two squares joining them. One outer row is yours, the other is your opponent's, and the middle row belongs to both of you.
- Five squares are marked with a rosette: two on each outer row and one in the middle row.
- Columns are lettered a to h and rows are numbered 1 to 3. Light has row 1 and dark has row 3. Your own row is drawn nearest you.
- The squares e1, f1, e3 and f3 do not exist: that is the gap either side of the bridge. The pieces you have yet to bring on wait in the gap beside the square they enter on, and the pieces you have brought home sit beside the square they left from.
The route
- Every piece follows the same route of fourteen squares. It enters on your own row at the fourth square from the end, runs along your row to the corner, turns into the middle row, runs the whole length of it, turns back onto your own row and leaves from the second square it reaches there.
- For light that is d1, c1, b1, a1, then a2 to h2 along the middle, then h1 and g1. Dark's route is the same with row 3 in place of row 1.
- So the first four squares and the last two are yours alone, and nothing can touch a piece there. The eight squares of the middle row are shared.
The dice
- Four dice are thrown each turn. Each is a little four-cornered pyramid that lands with a marked corner up or an unmarked one, and the chance of each is even.
- Your roll is the number of dice that landed marked: anything from nothing to four. Two is the commonest roll, and nothing and four are the rarest.
- The game throws the dice for you when your turn begins, and both of you can see them.
Your turn
- Move one piece forward along the route by exactly the roll. You choose which piece. Bringing a new piece on counts as a move: a roll of 1 puts it on the first square of the route, a roll of 4 on the fourth.
- A piece may jump over other pieces, yours or your opponent's. What matters is the square it lands on.
- It may not land on a square that holds one of your own pieces. There is never more than one piece on a square.
- If any of your pieces can move, you must move one. If only one can, it still waits for you to play it.
Capturing
- If your piece lands on a square that holds an opponent's piece, you capture it. It goes back to your opponent's hand and has to start the route again.
- That can only happen in the middle row, because it is the only place both of you go.
Rosettes
- When a piece lands on a rosette you take another turn at once: the dice are thrown again and you move again. Land on another rosette and you go again.
- A piece standing on a rosette cannot be captured. Four of the five rosettes are on squares only one of you uses, so this matters on the one in the middle row, d2: a piece there is safe, and your opponent's pieces have to jump it.
- For the same reason you cannot land on the middle rosette while your opponent has a piece on it.
Bringing a piece home
- A piece leaves the board by moving one step past the last square of the route, and it needs the exact roll to do it. From the last square that is a 1, from the square before it a 2.
- A roll that is too big does not move that piece at all. You must move another if you can.
Losing a turn
- If you roll nothing, your turn passes.
- If you roll something and none of your pieces can move by exactly that many, your turn passes too.
- The game does this for you and says so, with the roll that lost the turn. Nobody presses pass.
How a game ends
- The first to bring all seven pieces home wins. There are no draws to play for and no score beyond that.
- A game also ends if somebody resigns, or if a move deadline passes without a move.
Reading a move
- A move is written as the roll, then where the piece left and where it reached: 2: a2-c2. A piece brought on comes from the hand, 4: hand-a1, and one leaving the board goes home, 1: g1-home.
- An x after a move means it captured, and a star means it landed on a rosette. A roll followed by a dash is a turn the dice took.
Nobody knows the rules these boards were made for. The rules here are a modern reconstruction by Irving Finkel of the British Museum, in the form he played in a video of 2017, and they are the ones most people who know the game have met. Accounts differ on how much of them comes from a clay tablet of about 177 BC that he translated: one says the tablet describes how the game was played, another that it describes a more complicated game and that these simple rules are his own. Other sets of rules for the Royal Game of Ur exist, with a longer route, three dice, or rosettes that are not safe. This site plays this one.
Royal Game of Ur terms
- a rosette
- one of the five marked squares; landing on one gives you another turn, and a piece standing on one cannot be captured
- a roll
- how many of the four dice landed marked, from nothing to four; it is how far one piece moves
- the hand
- your pieces that are not yet on the board, or were captured and sent back
- home
- where a piece goes when it leaves the far end of the route; seven pieces home wins
- the shared row
- the eight squares of the middle row, which both routes run along and where captures happen