The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games in history, dating back to approximately 2600 BC. It was discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in the 1920s.
For decades, the rules were lost to time. However, in the early 1980s, British Museum curator Irving Finkel translated a clay tablet from 177 BC written by a Babylonian astronomer named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu. This tablet described the gameplay, allowing us to play this ancient game once again.
The game is a race between two players. Each player has 7 pieces. The objective is to move all of your pieces onto the board, travel along your specific path, and exit off the end of the board before your opponent does.
The game uses four tetrahedral (pyramid-shaped) dice. Two corners of each die are marked.
This creates a roll range of 0 to 4.
The first four squares and the last two squares are safe zones unique to each player. However, the middle track (8 squares) is shared.
If you land on a square occupied by an opponent's piece in the shared track (War Zone), you capture that piece. The captured piece is knocked off the board and must restart from the beginning.
The squares marked with a rosette are special:
While the dice provide an element of luck, Ur is a game of probability and tactics.
Because there are 4 dice with a 50/50 chance each, the probability follows a bell curve:
Since rolling a 2 is the most likely outcome, try to position your pieces 2 squares away from a rosette or an opponent's piece!
The rosette in the center of the "War Zone" is the most powerful square on the board. If you occupy it, you are safe from capture, you block your opponent, and you likely got an extra turn to get there. Prioritize getting this square.
Pieces that haven't entered the board yet cannot be captured. Sometimes it is better to leave pieces off the board until you get a favorable roll (like a 4) to jump straight into the War Zone.
Code generated by Gemini 3.
Title image (such that it is) is from Nano Banana. The cuneiform reads "Pack of Dogs", one of the earliest known names of this game.
Sound effects are from elevenLabs with custom bits written by Kevin MacLeod. (sorry about the stereo fields not matching)
This implementation of the game including audio, code, and images are released under the CC:Zero Creative Commons License. Do whatever you want with this.