The Royal Game of Ur — race through the shared middle
Two races share one road. Each player's pieces run their own short lane, cross a middle lane where they can knock each other off, and leave by their own lane. Rosette squares give another throw and keep a piece safe.
From The Royal Game of Ur, from ancient Mesopotamia.
What it shows a designer
A race with a shared middle, where luck decides the distance and you decide which piece to risk. It shows how a few special squares, the rosettes, shape the whole flow of a game.
Credits
- Made by
- Ancient Mesopotamia, about 2600 BCE; rules reconstructed by Irving Finkel of the British Museum
- This version
- Four coins in place of the four-sided dice of the original
- Sources
- www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_Rm-III-6-b
csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/On_the_Rules_for_the_Royal_Game_of_Ur.pdf
What you need
- paper with the 20-square board drawn (step 1)
- 7 pieces each, of two kinds
- 4 coins
How to play
- The board. Draw three rows of eight squares, then rub out the 5th and 6th squares of the top and bottom rows: 20 squares remain. Mark a rosette on the 1st and 7th squares of the top and bottom rows and on the 4th square of the middle row.
- The path. Each player uses the outer row nearest them. A piece's path is 14 squares: from the 4th square of your row back to its 1st, then the whole middle row from left to right, then your row's 8th and 7th squares. It leaves the board one step after that.
- Throw. Toss four coins. The number of heads is your move; no heads counts as 4.
- Move. Bring in a new piece onto that square of its path (a throw of 3 puts it on the 3rd square), or move one piece that many squares. Two of your pieces can't share a square. If no move is possible, you lose the turn.
- Rosettes and capture. Landing on a rosette gives another throw, and a piece on a rosette can't be taken. Landing on an opponent's piece in the middle row sends it back off the board to start again.
- Win. The first to take all seven pieces off the board, each by an exact throw, wins.
After playing, talk about
- When did you leave a piece on the shared road on purpose?
- How much did the coins decide?
- Why might there be a rosette in the middle of the shared row?
Its blocks
How its blocks were checked against BoardGameGeek
- The Royal Game of Ur: partly checkable, nothing against it. roll and move: confirmed (Roll / Spin and Move). race to finish: confirmed (Race). direct confrontation: not checkable. chance with mitigation: not checkable. historical: not checkable. take turns: not checkable.
In boardgameBuilder, Open game puts its blocks on the canvas. Changed, the same file can come back here from Propose a game.