The Royal Game of Ur - Iterations

Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur dates from 2600 B.C. It was discovered in the 1920s by Sir Leonard Wooley during his excavations at the city of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). In the early 1980s, Irving Finkel of the British Museum uncovered the rules of the game, long forgotten, by deciphering Sumerian cuneiform tablets.

Rules

The Royal Game of Ur is played by two players using a board consisting of 20 squares shown in Figure 1. One player has seven white stones and the other has seven black stones. Each player takes turns to throw four D4 dice (figure 2) or throwing sticks that are marked on one side and move one of their pieces according to the number indicated by the dice or sticks.

Figure 1: Royal Game of Ur board

Dice with marks upwards	Count
0	0
1	1
2	2
3	3
4	4

The goal is to move each stone along the 14-square path from the start square to the end and remove the stone from the board. The winner is the player who removes all their stones from the board first.

If a stone lands on a square marked with a star the player may roll again and if they are left on a star square they are protected from being destroyed by the opponent for as long as they are on that square. After rolling the dice the player moves the stone forward the number of squares shown by the dice roll. When starting a stone the first count is onto the start square. A player may have more than one stone on the board at a time. If the stone of one player lands on a square occupied by the stone of the opponent while on the center row, the opponent’s stone is removed from the board and must start again." Information and images quoted from  http://www.boardgamesoftheworld.com/ur.html and then alterations added by me.

Figure 2: D4 dice image taken from http://www.google.co.uk/images

The D4 dice shown above is a modern day D4 so is different from the table and relative counts, the D4 that would have been used originally would have been used by dotting two points on each of the four dice used and when thrown if the point facing upwards had a dot on that would count as one then the total of all four D4's would equal the amount the player could move.

New Board of Ur:

Below is an image of the new type of board that we also played on after we tried the original board game. After we played on this type of board we then added our iterations.

Figure 3: a new iteration of the original board game space

My Royal Game of Ur Iterations:

Once we had been paired up and ran through the original game me and my partner decided to use one Modern D4 meaning the player couldn't roll a 0 making the game move more quickly.
After this we decided to add the iteration that if the player can move they have to even if that meant moving from the safety of the star squares.
After a play through with these rules we decided on two iterations, the first was to determine who goes first, as arguing occurred, the first person to three in a game of rock-paper-scissors went first, then we decided that if a player jumps over and/or lands on an opponents square they are taken excluding the star squares.
Following another run through we decided to iterate a positive feedback loop which meant that if a player took a piece or multiple pieces they had an extra go, but only one go even if they took more than one piece, this was also a sort of negative feedback loop as well as the player who was behind could luckily take the others players piece and land on a star square afterwards meaning they could combine their movements to move quicker up the board in one go.
Our last iteration after playing through this we decided another negative feedback loop which meant, because of the rule of having to move if it is possible, through the introduction of a death square on the second to last board space, which meant for example, if the player in the lead had one piece left near the end and rolled the perfect number to land on the 'Death square' they had to land on it unless they had other pieces, which meant giving the loser the advantage as the winner has been sent back to that start.

Figure 4: Our iteration of the board space




I hope you have enjoyed this post and if you like you can make your own board and have a go at the original game, my iterations and also make your own iterations. Enjoy the Royal Game Of Ur.


Dan Out x