How to Play the Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player race game played on a 20-square board, using four-sided pyramid dice. It looks intimidating the first time you see the H-shaped board, but the actual rules take about two minutes to learn. Here's everything you need.

The goal

Each player has a set of pieces (7 in the classic Finkel rules, 5 in the fast Blitz variant) sitting off the board. You race them along a fixed path and off the other end. The first player to get all of their pieces around the board and off wins.

The board and your path

The board has three blocks of squares: a 4-square lane just for you, an 8-square shared lane in the middle that both players run through, and a 2-square lane just for you again at the end. Your opponent has their own private lanes on the mirrored side, but you both share that middle row — which is where the game gets tense.

The dice

Instead of numbered cubes, the Royal Game of Ur uses four tetrahedral (pyramid-shaped) dice, each with two of its four corners marked. You roll all of them and count how many marked corners land facing up — giving you a move of 0 to 4. A roll of 0 means you simply lose your turn (in the Masters rules, a 0 counts as a move of 4 instead — see our rules comparison for the differences).

Playing a turn

1. Roll. Count the marked corners facing up.
2. Move. Either bring a new piece onto the board at the square matching your roll, or move a piece already on the board forward by that number of squares.
3. You can't land on your own piece. Every square holds at most one piece, and it can't be one of yours.
4. Land on an opponent's piece in the shared middle row and it's captured — sent all the way back to their hand, to start again.
5. Land on a rosette (a flower-marked square) and you get to roll again. In the classic Finkel rules a piece sitting on a rosette also can't be captured — it's completely safe.

Bearing off

To take a piece off the board entirely, you need to roll the exact number needed to move it past the final square. You can't overshoot. The first player to bear off every one of their pieces wins the game.

That's really it

Four thousand six hundred years of history, and the whole rule set fits on an index card. The skill is entirely in the decisions: when to gamble a piece into the shared row, when to hang back on a rosette, and when to go for a capture instead of playing safe. See our strategy guide for tips on all three.