How to Play the Royal Game of Ur: Rules, Tactics and History
A race for two players: get all 7 of your pieces around the board and off it before your opponent does. The rules fit on a postcard. The decisions come from four dice, a shared road where you can knock each other back, and five lucky squares.
1The board and your route
The board has 20 squares in three rows. The outer two rows each belong to one player; the middle row is shared, and it is the only place the two sides ever meet.
Your pieces travel 14 squares: up your own 4 starting squares, along all 8 squares of the middle row, then into the last 2 squares of your own row. Your opponent does the same on the other side, so you both race along the middle row in the same direction.
Five of the squares are rosettes: square 4 and square 14 on your route (your opponent has their own pair), and square 8, in the middle of the shared row, which both of you pass over. They are the terracotta-tinted squares on the board.
2The dice, and why 2 comes up most
You throw four two-sided dice. Each one lands marked or blank with equal chance, and your throw is the number of marked dice: anything from 0 to 4.
Three dice marked, one blank: you move 3.
Four dice can land 16 different ways, and most of them make a 2:
The chance of each throw. A 2 can be made 6 ways out of 16; a 0 or a 4 only 1 way each.
So the average throw is 2, and a 4 is rare (6.25%). A 0 means you lose your turn. It only comes up 6.25% of the time, but over ten throws the chance of at least one 0 is 48%, so expect it.
3Moving and entering pieces
After you throw, pick one piece and move it exactly that many squares along your route. You can:
- Enter a new piece: a throw of 3 puts a piece from off the board onto square 3.
- Move a piece already on the board forward. Pieces jump over anything in between; only the square you land on matters.
You can't land on your own piece. If you have a legal move you have to make one; if you have none, your turn passes.
4Capturing: the middle row is a battlefield
Land on a square in the middle row where an enemy piece sits and you capture it: it goes back off the board and has to start its whole journey again. Your own starting and finishing squares are private, so a piece there can never be captured.
Both players count the middle row the same way: it is squares 5 to 12 for each of you. That makes it easy to see who can reach whom.
5The rosettes: throw again, and one safe square
- Land on any rosette and you throw again. If that throw lands you on another rosette, you throw again too.
- The middle rosette is safe. A piece on square 8 can't be captured, and while you hold it your opponent can't land there at all, so it blocks their best square.
- A throw of 4 can enter a new piece straight onto your first rosette, and then you throw again.
6Bearing off and winning
After square 14 a piece leaves the board, and it needs the exact throw to do it: one step past the last square. A throw that would carry it further doesn't move that piece at all. The first player to bear off all 7 pieces wins.
That's every rule. A whole game is 105 steps of movement per player (7 pieces × 15 steps each), before anyone gets knocked back.
7Four habits that win games
Every turn, ask these four questions about the moves you could make, in this order, and drop the moves that fail each one (unless that would leave none):
- Can I land on a rosette? Take the extra throw.
- Can I capture? Sending a piece back costs your opponent up to 12 squares of progress.
- Am I about to leave the middle rosette? Don't, unless nothing else can move. It's safe, and it blocks your opponent.
- Will my piece stop just in front of an enemy? Avoid stopping 1 to 4 squares ahead of one in the middle row.
We didn't just assume these work. We played 4,000 computer games for each habit, with our own rules engine: a player using all four against an identical player who skips that one habit, taking turns to go first.
| Habit | Games won by the player who keeps it |
|---|---|
| Take the rosette | 67% |
| Capture when you can | 93% |
| Hold the middle rosette | 67% |
| Don't stop in front of an enemy | 77% |
The order matters, too. Asking about safety before captures sounds careful, but it loses: the order above beat it in 79% of games. A capture is worth more than the risk you take to make it.
How risky is "just in front"?
An enemy piece behind you in the middle row hits you on its next throw only if it throws exactly the gap. Because 2 is the most common throw, two squares ahead is the worst place to stop:
| Enemy is behind you by | Chance it hits you next throw |
|---|---|
| 1 square | 25% |
| 2 squares | 37.5% |
| 3 squares | 25% |
| 4 squares | 6.3% |
| 5 or more | can't reach you |
Does going first matter? Barely. Between two players using all four habits, whoever threw first won 52% of games.
8Our rules, and other versions
Nobody knows exactly how the Royal Game of Ur was played when its famous boards were made (see the history below). Every modern ruleset fills the gaps with a reconstruction, and they don't all agree.
Ours is the set the British Museum's 2017 video made popular: 7 pieces each, four two-sided dice, an extra throw on any rosette, a safe middle rosette, and an exact throw to bear off.[13][14] Where other versions differ:
- Five pieces, not seven. The ancient rules tablet gives each player five, and so did an earlier British Museum replica set.[2][13]
- A different route. Our 14-square route is the one proposed by R.C. Bell. H.J.R. Murray suggested a 27-square route around the board, and James Masters one of 16 squares.[13][15]
- Bell's own rules. A piece enters only on a throw of 5, and landing on a rosette makes your opponent pay a fine into the pot instead of giving you another throw.[4]
- No extra throw at all. The ancient tablet doesn't give one: its rosettes win or lose bets. Irving Finkel suggests the extra throw only as a guess about how the earlier game worked.[2]
- Safe rosettes, or none. Some sets make every rosette safe, which plays the same as ours because only the middle one is shared. Others, including Masters', make no rosette safe.[14][15]
- A modern tournament variant lets pieces move backwards and stack on rosettes, with no extra throw.[14]
9A short history
The boards that gave the game its name were found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, in southern Iraq. Leonard Woolley began digging the cemetery in 1926, for a joint expedition of the Penn Museum and the British Museum that ran from 1922 to 1934.[1][2] The British Museum dates its board to 2600–2400 BC.[3]
That board is a hollow wooden box with a drawer for the pieces, its top inlaid with 20 shell squares, some carved with rosettes.[3] R.C. Bell describes the shell plaques as inlaid with lapis lazuli and red limestone, and the Penn Museum holds a fragment of another board from the cemetery, dated around 2450 BC.[4][5] Each player had seven pieces, and the dice found with the boards were four-sided pyramids or four-sided sticks.[2]
It was far from a one-off. More than 100 boards are now known, from Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt and Crete; the only match from Ur's own time is a wooden board from Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran.[2] Egypt imported the game from the Near East and played it from about 1580 to 1070 BC,[6] and one of Tutankhamun's game boxes has a 20-square board on its back.[7] Around 710–705 BC, someone scratched a board between the hooves of an Assyrian winged bull at Khorsabad; it is in the British Museum today.[8][9]
The rules come from much later. In Babylon in 177–176 BC, more than two thousand years after the Ur boards, a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu wrote out a cuneiform tablet that the British Museum calls the world's oldest known rules for a board game.[2][10] The museum's Irving Finkel decoded it in the early 1980s.[11] It describes a betting game: five pieces a side, named after birds; knucklebones for dice; rosettes that are lucky to land on and unlucky to pass over.[2][10]
What the tablet doesn't say: it covers only how pieces enter and what the rosettes do. On the route the pieces take, Finkel writes that there is "no evidence on the point".[2] So every modern version, ours included, is partly a reconstruction.
The game may not have vanished. Finkel identified a 20-square game called Aasha, played by the Jewish community of Kochi (Cochin) in India, as a descendant; Ruby Daniel, who left Cochin in 1951, recognised it.[12] And in 2017 a British Museum video of Finkel playing Tom Scott brought the modern rules to a new audience.[14][16]
Sources
- University of Pennsylvania Almanac, vol. 56, no. 9, on the Ur excavations. almanac.upenn.edu
- Irving L. Finkel, "On the Rules for the Royal Game of Ur", in I. L. Finkel (ed.), Ancient Board Games in Perspective, British Museum Press, 2007, pp. 16–32.
- British Museum, the Royal Game of Ur, museum no. 120834. britishmuseum.org
- R. C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, vol. I, 2nd ed., 1969, pp. 23–25.
- Penn Museum, gameboard fragment from Ur, object B16742. penn.museum
- Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, "Board Games from Ancient Egypt and the Near East", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. metmuseum.org
- Global Egyptian Museum, game box of Tutankhamun, Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 62058. globalegyptianmuseum.org
- British Museum, winged bull from Khorsabad, museum no. 118809. britishmuseum.org
- Dominique Collon, Mesopotamia gallery, BBC History, 2011. bbc.co.uk
- British Museum, the rules tablet, museum no. 33333,b. britishmuseum.org
- British Museum, object trail: twelve objects to see with children. britishmuseum.org
- The Hindu, MetroPlus, 1 October 2015: traditional board games from Kochi to Iraq. thehindu.com
- James Masters, "The Rules of the Royal Game of Ur", Masters Traditional Games (archived 17 December 2024). web.archive.org
- RoyalUr.net, rules and rulesets. royalur.net
- James Masters, The Online Guide to Traditional Games: the Royal Game of Ur. tradgames.org.uk
- The British Museum, Irving Finkel and Tom Scott play the Royal Game of Ur, YouTube, 2017. youtube.com