The History of the Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur is, as far as anyone can tell, the oldest board game in the world that we can still play by its original rules — and we only know those rules because of a chance discovery more than two thousand years after the game was buried.
Discovered in a royal tomb, 1926
British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, between 1922 and 1934. Among the astonishing grave goods — gold headdresses, lyres, chariots — he found several game boards buried in tombs dated to around 2600–2400 BCE. Made of wood inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, they are some of the most elaborate objects to survive from early Mesopotamia. The best-preserved board is now in the British Museum in London (museum number 1928,1010.378) — the same board this game's 3D model is based on.
A game with no known rules
For decades, nobody knew exactly how it was played. The board's odd shape — two blocks of squares joined by a narrow bridge — was a puzzle in itself, and Woolley could only guess at the rules from the layout and from similar board fragments found across the ancient Near East, from Egypt to Crete to the Indus Valley. The game had clearly spread far beyond Mesopotamia, evolving locally into games like Egyptian Aseb ("twenty squares").
The tablet that cracked it, 177 BCE
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: a small cuneiform tablet in the British Museum's collection, written by a Babylonian scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu in 177 BCE — over two thousand years after the game was first played. The tablet is essentially an instruction manual, using the board as a divination and fortune-telling tool, but in the process it lays out how the pieces move, which squares are dangerous, and how the dice work.
Curator and cuneiform specialist Irving Finkel spent years piecing together this and other fragmentary tablets, publishing his full reconstruction of the rules in 2007. It's his interpretation — now usually just called the "Finkel rules" — that this game offers as one of its three rule sets. See our full rules comparison for exactly how it plays.
A 4,600-year run
Boards matching the Ur pattern have been found across three thousand years of history and thousands of miles of geography — from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Crete to Sri Lanka, evolving as it spread. A version of the game was reportedly still played by Jewish communities in Cochin, India, into the 20th century, under the name Aasha, making the Royal Game of Ur a serious candidate for the longest continuously-played game in human history.
Playing it today
This site rebuilds the British Museum's board in 3D, textured from real photographs of the original artefact, and lets you play any of the three major reconstructed rule sets — solo against an AI, or online against a friend. No download, no account, no cost.