← Games Our Grandparents Played

Ancient Mesopotamia

The Royal Game of Ur

Also called the game of twenty squares

Boards for this race game were found in the royal tombs at Ur, in what is now Iraq, and are about 4,500 years old. One is in the British Museum.

Its rules come from a clay tablet written by a Babylonian scribe in 177 BC, read and published by the curator Irving Finkel.

The rules, briefly

• Each player races seven pieces along a track: up their own side, along a shared middle lane, and off the end.
• Throw four dice that each show 0 or 1 and move one piece that many squares.
• Land on an enemy piece in the middle lane and it goes back to the start. A piece on a rosette is safe, and landing on a rosette gives another throw.

Try this: Hold the middle rosette

The rosette in the middle of the shared lane is safe and lets you throw again. Try keeping one piece there as long as you can.

Play on AtlasTales (two players, one screen)

Read more: The Royal Game of Ur on Wikipedia. Written from published sources; if your family plays it differently, write your rules down in Heirloom Rules, and if something here is wrong, tell us: hello@sparkanvil.org.