The Royal Game of Ur Preview

boardgamequest.com:

Note: This preview uses pre-release components and rules. What you see here may be different from the final, published game. This post was a paid preview; you can find out more information here.

If you had to guess what the oldest known board game is, you’d probably think it was something like Checkers, Go, or maybe Backgammon. While all good guesses, they are also wrong. The oldest board game on record is The Royal Game of Ur. Found in Iraq in an area that used to be Mesopotamia, historians date this ancient game as far back as 2,400 B.C. It’s a simple roll-and-move game that was apparently wildly popular at the time.

Today, publisher Spartan Development seeks to take this historical artifact and give it a more modern-day spin. It’s a two-player game that takes about 30 minutes to play.

The original Royal Game of Ur was a simple roll-and-move board game. You rolled 4 dice and moved one of your pieces the number of pips rolled. The goal was to be the first to race all 7 of your pieces off the other edge of the board. Easy enough, but not a lot of strategy involved.

In this modern implementation, it’s no longer a race to the finish line. Instead, you are trying to be the first player to capture all 4 of the fort spaces. On a player’s turn they first roll their two dice, and depending on the number and color of pips rolled, they can take one of the following actions:

• Spawn a piece on the Lesser Realm Entrance.
• Move a piece: If you rolled 1 pip, then you can move one piece 1 space. If you rolled 2 pips, you can move one piece 2 spaces or two pieces 1 space.
• Depending on the die result, you may spawn a piece on one of the 3 special spaces.

If you move your piece onto an opponent’s piece, it’s eliminated and returned