About Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board games ever found. Beautiful boards about 4,500 years old were dug up in the royal tombs of Ur, a city in ancient Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq, by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The rules were later worked out from a Babylonian clay tablet written in cuneiform in 177 BC.
It is a race game for two players. You roll four pyramid-shaped dice, each marked on two corners, for a score from 0 to 4, and move one piece along your path: four squares on your side, eight down the shared middle row and two back on your side. Landing on a rosette gives another turn, the middle rosette is a safe square, and landing on an opponent in the middle row knocks it back to the start.
Eight opponents grow from a friendly market trader with four pieces each to the King of Ur himself with the full seven. Robot strategies, from random moves to careful players who avoid danger and guard the safe rosette, were tested in thousands of simulated games. Each win unlocks a history card about the game, its discovery and how its rules were rediscovered.
Best for ages 6+
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