Royal Game of Ur vs Backgammon
Both are two-player race games where you roll dice and move pieces around a track, and backgammon is sometimes described as a descendant of the Royal Game of Ur — so it's a fair question: how similar are they actually, and which one should you play?
Shared ancestry, different games
The resemblance is real: both are "race" games using dice, both have a notion of safe versus vulnerable positions, and archaeologists and games historians generally agree the Royal Game of Ur is part of the same family tree that, over a few thousand years and several intermediate games, eventually led to backgammon. But roughly 4,000 years and a lot of reinvention sit between them, and the two play quite differently at the table.
Key differences
| Royal Game of Ur | Backgammon | |
|---|---|---|
| Board | 20 squares, H-shaped: your own lanes plus one shared lane in the middle | 24 triangular points in 4 quadrants, no shared lane — your home board is private |
| Dice | 4 binary pyramid dice (0–4 per roll) | 2 six-sided cubes (2–12 per roll, doubles move 4 times) |
| Pieces | 7 per player (classic rules) | 15 per player |
| Captures | Land exactly on an opponent's piece outside a rosette to send it back to start | Land on a lone opposing piece ("blot") to send it to the bar |
| Safe squares | 4 fixed rosette squares, plus landing on one grants an extra turn | No fixed safe squares — safety comes from stacking two or more pieces on a point |
| Typical game length | 10–20 minutes | 15–45 minutes, often played as a match |
Which plays more "dangerous"
The Royal Game of Ur's single shared lane down the middle of the board makes for a very different feel from backgammon's layout: there's one stretch of track where you can genuinely corner an opponent's piece, and the four rosette squares are both a prize and a chokepoint everyone is fighting over. Backgammon spreads the danger out more evenly across its 24 points and leans more on long-range planning (the "pip count") than on a single contested lane.
Which should you play?
If you want something you can teach a complete beginner in two minutes and finish in one sitting, the Royal Game of Ur wins easily — the rules genuinely are simpler. If you want more strategic depth, doubling stakes, and a game with a deep competitive/tournament scene, backgammon is the better fit. They're complementary, not competing: plenty of people who already love backgammon end up enjoying the Royal Game of Ur precisely because it's the same family of game distilled down to its oldest, simplest form.
Try the original
See for yourself what a race game looked like 4,600 years before backgammon existed.
Play the Royal Game of Ur →