How to Play Senet: Rules, Tactics and History
A race for two players along a winding track of 30 squares: get all 5 of your pieces to the end and off the board first. Egyptians played it for well over two thousand years, but nobody wrote the rules down in a way that survived, so the version here, like every modern one, is a reconstruction.
1The board and the route
The board is 3 rows of 10 squares, and the route snakes through them: along the top row left to right, back along the middle row right to left, then along the bottom row to the end. Both players follow the same route in the same direction, so every square is shared.
2The sticks, and why four blanks is best
Instead of dice you throw four throwing sticks, each light on one side and blank on the other. Count the light sides that land face up: that's your move.
Three light sides, one blank: you move 3.
Four blanks isn't nothing: it's a 5, the longest move in the game.
Four sticks 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 4 (all light) and a 5 (all blank) only 1 way each.
The average throw is 2.31. A throw of 1, 4 or 5 earns another throw once you've moved, and those come up 37.5% of the time, so turns often run to two or three moves. There's one catch: if a 1, 4 or 5 can't be played, you lose the extra throw along with it, and the turn passes.
3Setting up and moving
The ten pieces start on the first ten squares, alternating: one player's pieces (cones, in our app) on squares 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, the other's (spools) on 2, 4, 6, 8, 10.
On your turn, throw and move one piece exactly that many squares along the route. 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, and if you have none, your turn passes.
4Swaps, pairs and walls
Land on a square where a lone enemy piece stands and the two pieces swap places: yours moves forward, and theirs goes back to the square you came from.
Pieces of one side protect each other:
- A pair is safe. Two pieces of the same side on neighbouring squares can't be landed on, so neither can be swapped.
- Three in a row is a wall. 3 pieces of one side on neighbouring squares can't be landed on or passed by the other side. (You can always pass your own pieces.)
The board counts as one long line here, so squares 10 and 11, or 20 and 21, are neighbours too, even though they sit at the ends of different rows.
5The last five squares
Squares 26 to 30 are where the race is won and lost, and square 15 is where it can be undone.
26: the House of Beauty is a gate
No piece may pass square 26. Every piece has to land on it exactly, then move on from there. So a piece on squares 21 to 25 needs one particular throw to reach it:
A piece waiting on 21 to 25 can still move forward short of 26, so it isn't stuck, but only one piece can stand on 26 at a time, and the queue behind it can get long.
27: the House of Water
A piece that lands on square 27 is washed straight back to square 15 (or, if 15 is taken, the first empty square before it). Because nothing may pass 26, the only way in is a throw of 1 from square 26, and from there a 1 comes up 25% of the time. It costs 11 squares of progress.
28 to 30, and bearing off
A piece leaves the board by landing exactly on an imaginary square 31 just past the end. So the throw it needs is exactly the number of steps to that imaginary square:
| From square | Leaves on a | Chance a throw |
|---|---|---|
| 26 · House of Beauty | 5 | 6.25% |
| 28 · House of Three Truths | 3 | 25% |
| 29 · House of Re-Atoum | 2 | 37.5% |
| 30 · House of Horus | 1 | 25% |
A throw that would carry a piece past square 31 doesn't move that piece at all. A piece on 28 or 29 can also step forward to 29 or 30 instead of leaving. The first player to bear off all 5 pieces wins.
6Two habits that win games
Senet is mostly luck, but not all luck. We tested advice with our own rules engine: a computer player that steps around the Water, keeps its pieces out of reach, takes swaps and lands on 26 when it can, against an identical player who skips one habit, 4,000 games for each, taking turns to go first. Two of those habits clearly decide games:
- Stay out of the Water. When a piece sits on 26, keep another piece free to move, so a 1 never has to be played onto 27.
- Don't leave a piece alone in front of an enemy. A lone piece 1 to 5 squares ahead of an enemy piece can be swapped back. Move it on, or put a partner beside it.
| Habit | Games won by the player who keeps it |
|---|---|
| Stay out of the Water | 61% |
| Don't leave a piece alone in front of an enemy | 62% |
How likely is a swap?
An enemy piece behind your lone piece swaps it 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 stand alone:
| Enemy is behind you by | Chance it swaps you next throw |
|---|---|
| 1 square | 25% |
| 2 squares | 37.5% |
| 3 squares | 25% |
| 4 squares | 6.3% |
| 5 squares | 6.3% |
| 6 or more | can't reach you |
Does going first matter? The player on the odd squares starts a step behind and throws first to make up for it. That nearly evens things out: between two players using the habits above, the first thrower won 49% of games.
7Our rules, and other versions
Nobody knows how Senet was really played. No full set of rules has ever been found.[13][7] Every modern version, ours included, is a reconstruction: a scholar's best guess from the boards, the paintings and a few texts.
Ours is based on Timothy Kendall's reconstruction, which he published as a boxed game in 1978,[15] with changes of our own. Like Kendall's, it has four sticks, another throw on a 1, 4 or 5, the swap, protected pairs, and square 26 reached only by an exact throw.[13] Where the published versions differ:
- Kendall's own rules give each player seven pieces, decide who starts by who first throws a 1, and have you make all your throws before you move. A piece that can't move forward must move backward. A piece on 27 can go back to 15 and lose a turn, or wait there for a 4; a piece that reaches 30 leaves on any later throw.[13]
- Gustave Jéquier (1930) has the wall of three that we use, which Kendall doesn’t. He counts all-blank sticks as a 6 and gives another throw on 1, 4 or 6; a piece landed on goes back to the empty square furthest from the end, rather than swapping; pieces can only leave once all of them are in the last row, and the loser's stragglers decide the score.[13]
- Peter Piccione's rules, written for the commercial King Tut's Game, have no swaps at all (two pieces simply can't share a square). Pieces enter on a 1, only a 5 earns another throw, squares 15 and 26 give a free throw, and the Water takes a piece off the board to start again.[13]
- R.C. Bell gives each player ten pieces and a single four-sided die; a piece landed on is removed, and the player with the most pieces borne off wins.[14][13]
8A short history
Its name means "passing".[4][6] The board was always the same shape: 30 squares in three rows of ten, with the last five usually decorated,[4][2] and the route ran in an S through them. Numbering the squares 1 to 30 is a modern scholars' convention.[4][2]
The earliest likely trace is a set of 25 ivory squares from a First Dynasty tomb at Abu Rawash, dated about 3100–2900 BCE, three of them marked like later Senet boards.[1] The game is shown in the painted tomb of Hesy-Re, from the Third Dynasty (2686–2613 BCE).[1][3] Players threw sticks or knucklebones, and moved pieces shaped like cones and spools.[4][5] Peter Piccione writes that Old Kingdom players had seven pieces each, and five from the 18th Dynasty on.[3]
In the New Kingdom (about 1550–1070 BC) the game became tied to the journey to the afterlife; scenes of Senet appear among the illustrations to chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead.[4][2] In her tomb (QV 66, from the reign of Ramesses II), Queen Nefertari is painted playing against an invisible opponent.[8] Tutankhamun was buried with several game boxes; one, in ebony and ivory, has a Senet board on top, a 20-square board underneath, and a drawer for pieces, knucklebones and throwing sticks.[9][10] Boards survive in museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum's from a tomb at Abydos, from the reign of Thutmose III (about 1479–1425 BCE).[11]
Senet travelled. The first intact boards come from Arad in southern Canaan (3080–2700 BCE), and Cyprus took up the game near the end of the third millennium BCE.[1] The latest certain evidence is from the 26th Dynasty (664–525 BCE): platters from Tell Defenneh with the game's grid. Claims that it was still played in Roman times are unproven.[1][12]
What survived, and what didn't: boards and paintings from more than two thousand years of play, but not the rules. The texts that mention the game don't say how to play it,[14][3] which is why the versions above disagree, and why ours is one reconstruction among several.
Sources
- Walter Crist, "Debunking the Diffusion of Senet", Board Game Studies Journal 15(1), 2021, pp. 13–27. doi.org
- Walter Crist, "Passing from the Middle to the New Kingdom: A Senet Board in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum", Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 105(1), 2019, pp. 107–113.
- Peter A. Piccione, "In Search of the Meaning of Senet", Archaeology 33, July/August 1980, pp. 55–58. charleston.edu
- Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, "Board Games from Ancient Egypt and the Near East", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. metmuseum.org
- Danielle Zwang, "Senet and Twenty Squares: Two Board Games Played by Ancient Egyptians", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. metmuseum.org
- Brooklyn Museum, game board with separate drawer, 37.93Ea-b. brooklynmuseum.org
- Brooklyn Museum, game board, 36.2. brooklynmuseum.org
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nina de Garis Davies, "Queen Nefertari Playing Senet" (facsimile), 30.4.145. metmuseum.org
- Griffith Institute, Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation, Carter no. 345, games-box (Cairo JE 62058). griffith.ox.ac.uk
- Global Egyptian Museum, Senet game of Tutankhamun, Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 62058. globalegyptianmuseum.org
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gameboard and gaming pieces, 01.4.1a. metmuseum.org
- British Museum, EA23803 (a platter from Tell Defenneh). britishmuseum.org
- Ludii Portal (Digital Ludeme Project), Senet and its rulesets: Kendall, Jéquier, Piccione, Bell. ludii.games
- R. C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, vol. I, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 25–28.
- ARCE Library, catalogue record for Timothy Kendall, Passing Through the Netherworld: The Meaning and Play of Senet, an Ancient Egyptian Funerary Game, Kirk Game Company, 1978. library.arce.org