The Royal Game of Ur

👥 2 players 📍 Indoor📍 Anywhere ⚡ Moderate 🧩 Moderate ⏱ 20-40 minutes 🎂 Ages 8+

Quick Pitch

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board games ever discovered — a two-player race played on a 20-square board with special "rosette" squares that grant extra turns and safe landing spots.

Hook

This game is 4,600 years old. People in ancient Mesopotamia played it the same way you're about to — rolling dice, racing pieces, and knocking their opponent's tokens back to the start. We know the rules because an ancient Babylonian tablet was found that explains exactly how it works. When you play the Royal Game of Ur, you're playing the same game as people from 2600 BCE. That's pretty cool.

Equipment Needed

  • A 20-square board (three rows: a row of 4 on the left, a middle row of 12, and a row of 4 on the right — see the board layout below)
  • 7 tokens per player in two different colors (14 total)
  • 4 binary dice or pyramid dice (each face is either 0 or 1 — traditionally marked tetrahedra; use coins as a substitute)

Improvising with what you have:

  • Draw the board on paper (see diagram below)
  • Use coins or buttons in two colors as tokens
  • Flip 4 coins to generate your roll (heads = 1, tails = 0; add them up)

The Board

[4][3][2][1]  [R]      <- Player 1 path (top)
[5][6][7][8] [9][10][11][12]
[4][3][2][1]  [R]      <- Player 2 path (bottom)
                    ↑
             [R] marks rosette squares (squares 4, 8, 14 in the path)

Both players share the middle row (squares 5–12). Each player has their own private rows at top and bottom. Mark three squares with a star or special symbol — these are the rosette squares.

Setup

  1. Place the board between both players.
  2. Each player puts all 7 of their tokens off the board near their starting corner.
  3. Decide who goes first — flip a coin or each player rolls their dice.

Rules

Objective

Be the first player to move all 7 of your tokens all the way around the board and off the far end.

Rolling

On your turn, roll all 4 binary dice (or flip 4 coins) and add up the results: you'll get a number between 0 and 4. That's how many squares your token moves. If you roll 0, your turn ends without moving.

Moving

Choose one of your tokens to move. Tokens move along a fixed path: from your private starting row, through the shared middle section, and back out through your private finishing row to the exit.

You can only move one token per turn. If you have no legal moves, your turn passes.

Rosette Squares

Three squares on the board are marked with a rosette pattern. When your token lands on a rosette:

  • You get an extra roll immediately.
  • Your token is safe — it cannot be captured while it's sitting on a rosette.

Capturing

If your token lands on a square already occupied by your opponent's token (in the shared middle section only), you capture it! The captured token goes back off the board and must start from the beginning again. You cannot capture tokens on rosette squares.

Tokens cannot share a square with your own tokens either — you can't land on a square you already occupy.

Winning

The first player to successfully move all 7 tokens off the board wins.

Expert Player

Tips

Get tokens to rosette squares as quickly as possible. Rosettes give extra turns and protect your tokens from capture. A token sitting on a rosette is essentially free for as long as it stays there — your opponent cannot remove it.

Don't cluster your tokens in the shared section. The middle row is contested territory. Spreading your tokens out means your opponent can't get a big capture reward by landing on just one square.

Time your entries carefully. You control when to bring new tokens onto the board. If your opponent has pieces positioned to capture on your entry squares, it's sometimes better to advance an existing token instead.

Balance offense and defense. Rushing all tokens toward the exit might seem efficient, but tokens that trail behind can still be captured. Keep at least one eye on which of your tokens are exposed.

The endgame race is tense. With both players trying to exit their last few pieces, a single capture can decide the whole game. Be especially careful about leaving vulnerable tokens in the late stages.

Variations

  • Different Token Counts: Some reconstructions use 5 tokens per player for a shorter game.
  • Modern Reconstruction: Irving Finkel of the British Museum has documented a detailed version of the rules based on cuneiform tablets, which includes additional nuances about capture and movement.
  • Simplified Version: For younger players, remove the capture rule entirely — tokens simply race without interaction.
Learn More — History & Origins

History & Origins

The Royal Game of Ur was discovered in the 1920s by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during excavations of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. Several beautifully decorated game boards were found in the royal cemetery, dating to approximately 2600–2400 BCE, making them among the oldest surviving board game artifacts ever discovered. The boards were inlaid with shell, bone, and lapis lazuli — objects this finely crafted were clearly prized possessions of the Sumerian elite.

For decades, the rules of the game were unknown. The boards survived, but without explanation. The puzzle was partially solved in 1980 when Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, translated a Babylonian cuneiform tablet dating to around 177 BCE — over two thousand years after the original boards were made — that described the rules of a game matching the board's layout. The tablet gave researchers the foundation they needed to reconstruct how the game was played, though some aspects of the rules remain debated among scholars.

Cultural Context

The Royal Game of Ur holds a remarkable place in the history of games: it is one of the few ancient games for which we have both the physical artifacts and a written description of the rules. This makes it playable today in a way that many ancient games — like Senet, whose rules are still disputed — are not. When you set up a game of Ur, you're using a reconstructed version of something real, with genuine historical evidence behind it.

The game demonstrates something universal about human beings: we have always played games. The people who played on these boards lived in a world without writing as we know it, without cities as we know them, with a completely different understanding of the cosmos and human fate — and yet they sat across from each other and tried to race their pieces to the finish line while blocking each other's path. That impulse hasn't changed in 4,600 years.

See Also