The Original Royal Game of Ur Board

Every online or wooden recreation of this game, including this one, is modelled after a real, physical object: a small inlaid board a little bigger than a chessboard, buried in a royal tomb in what is now southern Iraq for roughly 4,500 years before anyone saw it again.

Size and shape

The board is modest in size — typically cited at around 28 × 11.5 × 2.5 cm (roughly 11 × 4.5 × 1 inches), small enough to hold in two hands. Its distinctive silhouette is really two rectangular blocks of squares joined by a narrow two-square bridge: a 4×3 block of twelve squares at one end, and a 2×3 block of six squares at the other, for twenty playable squares in total.

What it's made of

The best-known surviving boards are built up from a wooden core, veneered and inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli set in bitumen — the same luxury materials used across the royal tombs at Ur for jewellery and other prestige objects. Five of the twenty squares are marked with an eight-petalled rosette pattern; those are the squares this game (and most modern reconstructions) treats as safe, extra-turn squares.

Where it was found

British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the best-preserved examples between 1926 and 1930, while digging the Royal Cemetery of Ur — a set of royal and elite tombs at the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, near modern Nasiriyah, Iraq. The boards were found alongside other grave goods, suggesting the game was played by, or buried with, people of high status. See our full history of the game for how it was excavated and later deciphered.

Where to see one today

One of the best-preserved original boards is held by the British Museum in London (museum number 1928,1010.378), which is also the board this 3D recreation is modelled on. Other fragments and related boards from the same broad tradition have turned up at sites across the ancient Near East, now spread across several museum collections — a reminder that this wasn't a one-off curiosity but a game people actually played, widely, for a very long time.