S3E06 - The Royal Game of Ur (Ancient Games)

#Archaeology #AncientGames #Ur #Senet #Mehen #BoardGames #Science

Summary

We're looking deep into history today as we talk about the oldest board game with a known ruleset: the Royal Game of Ur. Joining us is Dr. Walter Crist, an archaeologist and expert in ancient games. We cover ancient dice sets, the meanings of games, centuries-old games made with graffiti, how Walter and colleagues are using AI to decipher now-lost rulesets, and why you should play some ancient games. In addition to Ur, we talk about Senet, Mehen, Hounds and Jackals, and several others, so grab your fedora and hand brush, and let uncover some of the oldest ways we have to play dice with the universe.

Timestamps

0:00 Introductions
2:04 Ancient dice and Egyptian honey
5:26 The Royal Game of Ur
9:15 Decyphering the rules
15:41 Who made the gameboards?
19:46 Why did people play these games?
23:38 What do the symbols mean?
25:29 Senet, Mehen, 20 Squares, and other games
32:35 Games in and out of civilization
36:08 Gaming archaeology in practice
39:54 Using AI to decipher ancient rules
47:36 Why YOU should play ancient games
51:00 Final grades

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Brian 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason Wallace 0:11
Today we'll be talking about the royal game of Ur.

Jason Wallace 0:17
All right, everyone, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Jason.

Brian 0:20
This is Brian,

Jason Wallace 0:21
and today we are joined by our special guest, Dr. Walter Crist, who's going to tell us about the Royal Game of Ur and ancient games. So, Walter, can you please introduce yourself?

Walter 0:30
Yeah, hi, I'm Walter Crist. I am an archeologist working at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Basically, I study ancient games. Mostly, my area of expertise is in the Bronze Age, so around four to 3000 years ago, mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean, so like Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, places like that in Greece. Lately, I've been studying that along with computer scientists, trying to find ways to use AI to understand ancient games a little bit better. I've been doing this for quite a long time now, and I think it's a really interesting and new way to talk about ancient lives that have kind of been ignored in the past. So I'm excited to talk about it with you guys.

Brian 1:11
I recently got fascinated by the Bronze Age collapse, and I think just because it is such a crazy mystery.

Walter 1:18
Yeah, yeah, and I think it has some interesting effects on the ways people play games too, which I don't know. Maybe we'll talk about it here. I haven't published on it yet, though.

Jason Wallace 1:26
And do you have any favorite modern games? We'll talk about ancient games later. But do you enjoy any modern games?

Walter 1:31
The modern games that I usually play are: I usually play video games. I mean, I do play board games, but mostly video games. My favorite game of all time is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I love that, and I'm so excited for the the re-release and the remake that's happening later this year.

Jason Wallace 1:46
My wife is also very excited about that. Although we determined that the biggest quality of life improvement that there needs to be is the ability to turn off Navi.

Walter 1:54
Yes, I think that is also true.

Jason Wallace 1:57
For those who don't know the game, Navi is your annoying fairy companion who won't shut up?

Walter 2:01
Yep. Hey, hey! All the time.

Brian 2:04
Listen.

Jason Wallace 2:04
All right. Well, let's go on to some of our fun science facts. So, Walter, as our guest, we'd like you to go first. What do you have to share with our audience?

Walter 2:12
So, there was some really, really cool research that came out just a couple of months ago by an archeologist working in somewhere in Colorado who did a study of objects that came from ancient sites going back 12,000 years in North America, mostly in West and Southwest North America, and found that there's a continuous tradition of making these artifacts that look like dice. He traced them back from the 19th century, from ethnographic collections, all the way back 12,000 years. So it seemed like people were using dice in the Americas for at least the past 12,000 years, and that's really the the earliest that we can see games in the ancient record. And I think that's really cool and exciting new news.

Brian 2:52
Are those like the six sided cube dice, or were they different shapes?

Walter 2:55
No they're not. So they use binary dice. So basically, a bunch of like objects that are marked on one side, and they're usually you know different shapes, but they're marked on one side and blank on the other, or maybe marked differently on two sides. And you take a bunch of them and throw them, and based on what side lands up, it gives you a number. So it's kind of like if you like threw five coins and then you count every time there's a head that lands up, it gives you a number.

Brian 3:20
A bunch of D2s.

Walter 3:21
Exactly. Yeah.

Brian 3:23
What were they made out of? Are they are they made out of stone or bone?

Speaker 1 3:27
bone, and I think some I think may have been clay also or stone. But yeah, a lot of bone, especially.

Brian 3:33
So dice goblins went back 1000s and 1000s of years. It's a strong tradition.

Speaker 2 3:38
Yes, absolutely.

Jason Wallace 3:41
How about you, Brian? What do you got for us?

Brian 3:44
So I was looking around and I wanted to connect this to microbiology, but also to archeology. So I'm going to talk about a fact that everybody knows and isn't quite true: is that honey never spoils. So honey is really good at staying preserved. It's got low water content. It's got high pH (*correction low pH), and those are good things to keep bacteria and mold from growing also supposedly produces hydrogen peroxide. Well, it does produce hydrogen peroxide, but that was the like. Well, that can't be it because hydrogen peroxide is pretty stable, but it's not 1000s of years stable. So I think a lot of this goes back to oh, people have found edible honey in in Egyptian tombs, and it's kind of true. There were clay jars that I think were found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. Hopefully, I'm getting this right. Like again, this is one of these stories where like the facts sound almost too good to be true, so I'm trying to track it down. They did find clay jars that were marked with honey, inside they found sort of a slight caramel trace that a chemical testing then confirmed would have been edible honey. So you're not going to an Egyptian tomb, cracking open a jar, and pouring it out on your pancakes or something.

Jason Wallace 4:41
I think probably for most people's pantries, we can assume honey is going to stay relatively edible until it crystallizes. Yeah, but don't plan on putting in your like honey 5000 year time capsule and having it still be good.

Speaker 3 4:55
No and especially if you're not in Egypt, like the preservation in Egypt is very particular because. It's very hot and very dry. So if you're doing that anywhere else, it's definitely going to get weird.

Brian 5:04
I think that was something they said too. Sealed jars in a tomb is a very different condition than your pantry.

Jason Wallace 5:10
I guess nowadays, if you really want to preserve honey that long, you're going to have to like vacuum seal it and launch it into space, and that's about the only place you'll be able to keep it that long.

Brian 5:18
Space honey,

Jason Wallace 5:21
you know someone would pay for that space.

Brian 5:23
Oh yeah, for sure. People will pay for all kinds of crazy stuff.

Jason Wallace 5:26
Okay, all right. Well, let's wind this back then to ancient times. So we're going to talk about the Royal Game of Ur today. So this was one that I didn't know about until about a year ago, when someone we had over for dinner pointed me at it, and when I started looking into it, like, oh, we've got to do an episode on this. The reason we're doing the Royal Game of Ur is because it's the oldest board game with a known rule set. There are traces of it going back 4,500 years or so, back to about 2500, 2600 BC. And so you may have realized that our introduction was a little different. We didn't list a publisher. That's because there is none. This is way in the common domain

Brian 6:00
from "The Bronze Age",

Jason Wallace 6:02
yes, from our Bronze Age forbearers. But basic idea: this is a fairly simple, simple in air quotes game because I looked up one paper that had a mathematical analysis and was saying that in some respects it has as many like choice options as chess does, which seems strange for such a simple game. What the game is is it's a board. The one that we played on and that is most commonly shown is like two rectangles that are connected by a small thin bridge. There's a total of 20 squares on it, and basically, if you took a rectangle that had like three rows and eight columns, and you took out two of the columns slightly off middle, then you end up with like the two big rectangles and a little bridge connecting them, and this is the board you play on.

Brian 6:43
It kind of like reminds me just a little bit, not really, but like a hopscotch board, which maybe that's also not a reference everybody would get.

Jason Wallace 6:50
Again, we're stuck in the method of trying to describe something visually in an audio medium. So if you really want to know, look it up,

Brian 6:56
Jason. You're going to put this on the splash image for the episode, right?

Jason Wallace 6:59
Yes, there's going to be a splash.

Brian 7:00
Well, there you go.

Jason Wallace 7:01
You do a Google search, you'll find it. This seems to be the older version of the game. I did find several articles that mentioned a more recent one, merely 1700 BCE, that was where they took the second rectangle and sort of straightened it out, so that you had a rectangle on one side where you started, and then a long thin section going off after that.

Brian 7:21
We just did our little minisodes. Is that then contemporary with Go? Seems like we've been talking about old games now because we did chess. Now Go. Now the Royal Game of Ur. We just keep going further and further back in time.

Jason Wallace 7:32
I think the oldest confirmed date on Go is about 500 BCE. Oh, I think this is still about 1000 years before that.

Walter 7:40
Yeah, so that's about right.

Jason Wallace 7:42
Yeah, Go claims the title of the oldest game that is still and has been continuously played. Anyway, the point of the Royal Game of Ur, it's a racing game. So you have a bunch of pieces that you're trying to get off the other edge of the board. You have some dice, which in the traditional one are little tetrahedrons, so little pyramids, D4s. If you're familiar with those from like role-playing games, or you can use binary dice, like Walter was talking about earlier. In fact, that's what we did when I made it up. Is I took a bunch of popsicle sticks and I painted one side white and the other side black, and those were our dice.

Brian 8:12
Those were really fun to throw, by the way. I think we need more games where we throw painted sticks.

Jason Wallace 8:16
Okay. Each time you you make a roll or a throw, then you get a certain number of moves. You move your pieces onto the board. You each have seven total. You sort of start in a safe place. You go into a contested spot where you can capture each other's pieces and then basically send them back to start. And eventually, you end up at a safe spot and you need to get off the board. The first person to get all seven of their pieces off the board wins. It's relatively simple and straightforward, and yet there's strategy to it in terms of picking, like okay, which is the best move to make, because there's different odds for how many spaces you'll be able to move, how many spaces your opponent will be able to move based on the dice rolls, and so there is strategy to it. And this is where that game complexity I mentioned comes into play, is because even though the number of possible game states is much lower than chess, the number of decision points is actually roughly on par with it.

Brian 9:02
Basically, it's like you're most likely to roll two. So, like if you're gonna move and there's another piece within two of you, you're at risk of being captured. So you got to think like, well, maybe, but maybe not. I mean, I might just risk it.

Jason Wallace 9:15
And I should say that what I'm describing here is probably the most common rule set, which is nowadays known as the Finkel rule set because of Dr. Irving Finkel at the British Museum, who published these based off of some clay tablets that were rediscovered. I don't know the full story behind this. They were originally archived like 100 years ago, and it took a while for people to realize they were talking about a game. And then he put these together, said, "Oh, these are talking about the Royal Game of Ur, and these are the rules we can infer based off what they're talking about. Being an ancient game, there's two things to keep in mind here. One, people have been speculating how to play this for a while. So just in my cursory research, I ran across at least four or five different rule sets that people speculate could have been used. And then the second thing to remember is that being an ancient game that was around for literally 1000s. Of years, people probably did play this in many, many different ways. You think of all the different ways people house rule different games today. If any of you play Magic: The Gathering, that theoretically has one rule set, and yet has dozens upon dozens of ways people play it. People will get creative in terms of how they use it. So there probably was not a single rule set people used. There were various ones. And Walter, maybe you can correct me on this. My understanding is that the Finkel rule set, the tablets he used to derive that, are actually not describing the base rules. They're actually describing a variation of rules from which he sort of back calculated a likely set of rules for the base game. Is that correct?

Walter 10:35
That's kind of the gist of what's going on there. So yeah, the rule set that he translated seemed to be describing some kind of variation on what probably was the base game, and probably the reason why they wrote it down was because it was something a little bit different. Because the base kind of game, the normal way that people play, everybody would just know, you know, learn it growing up, like we do with something like checkers, right? Most people don't learn to play checkers by reading the rules. You've learned it from somebody else, and throughout human history, this is usually the way people learn how to play games. So that's probably why those rules were written down in the first place, was because they were kind of this weird variation. And there are only like certain parts that are written down, which are probably the things that are different about it, rather than the full list of rules. He also draws from some more ethnographic parallels on similar games on boards that seem to be shaped similarly to what was originally the Royal Game of Ur, and now talking about the later version, the one with the long track that you were talking about, which we usually call 20 Squares. So he found out about a woman who was from the Jewish community in Cochin, India, that had well, he found a version of this game that was in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem that had been donated by that community to there, and a woman who remembered the rules and the board looks almost exactly like the ancient game. So he talked to her, and she taught him how to play this, and from what I can tell, he's taken those rules, which largely do coincide with what we can see from that tablet, and put them on this game board. And there are other types of games that have similar geometries. You know, where you have two entry points where you are sort of safe, and then you have a shared part where you can knock each other off with safe spaces that are very commonly played in particularly South Asia. That seem to be like an inspiration for okay, what might the rules have been for this game? Because this is what we do in archeology: is we find something, and okay, if you don't know how something works, you look to how people have used similar kinds of objects, and like how how have they done it to try to infer how something might be used?

Brian 12:46
So ethnographic that means just looking at similar things, other games, just to try to make a modern analogy. This would be like trying to infer the rules for like a trick taking game using a standard deck of cards. It's like well, it's often like this, so maybe we can backfill and say this would be a reasonable supposition?

Walter 13:04
Yeah, I mean ethnography is observing people in real life and like what they're doing in your current moment. If you're interested in how people use particular tools to farm or how they use particular tools to make textiles, you can observe people doing that and see how they use particular things, and then you can use that to infer if you find similar objects that look very similar to the ones that you've observed people using. Then you can sort of infer if you find the things that look the same. You know, you have this particular toolkit that looks the same now as it does in the past. Okay, they're probably using these tools to do that thing that we observe people doing.

Jason Wallace 13:40
Basic idea that ancient people are still people, and we tend to think along very similar lines.

Walter 13:45
Yeah, and also the idea that, like, as I was saying, like these games are transmitted from person to person from memory by teaching them verbally or by playing them. You also have sort of different kinds of expectations for what these games can be. You have a board, and you have a set of pieces, and maybe the dice. You can come up with lots of very creative ways to do that, and especially with what our expectations are for modern board game design. But that doesn't seem to be the case for traditional kinds of games that have this method of transmission. They tend to be quite light in the number of rules you have to remember, but quite elegant in the way they actually play out.

Jason Wallace 14:20
Yeah, it strikes me that the only ones that would last 1000s of years are the ones that were simple enough to transmit and yet complex enough to have good replayability and fun. Assuming that's why they were actually being played.

Brian 14:31
One of the things I enjoyed about The game of it's not "er" it's "or" right. It's more like "or"?

Walter 14:36
"Or" yeah, I think so.

Brian 14:37
Okay, is that I liked it because we could have a conversation while playing, and it actually wasn't that disruptive. I like a game that's like that, where you can play, you can do your thing, you can still be having a conversation at the same time, which I imagine is probably how this was played, right? You imagine a bunch of old men sitting down playing dominoes or something.

Walter 14:54
Yeah, I absolutely, in my research, I really try to focus on the social aspect of games, and I think that is probably the most powerful aspect of games, and why they last so long is because they have this local aspect. You have to play it with somebody else, and I think these kinds of games that sort of have this chance element. I mean, I guess there are a lot of choices that you might have to make, but you don't have to sit and ponder over it like you might with chess, right? I think that leads to the longevity of a lot of these kinds of games, where you just you can sit, you can have a beer, you can play a game, you just throw the dice and chat, and you know you don't have to concentrate for minutes at a time on what your move is going to be.

Brian 15:34
Just kind of a light game as far as the depth goes in a in a modern parlance.

Walter 15:38
And yeah, in in modern sense of things, yes.

Brian 15:41
I have one more question. Sorry, I know I'm Jason's got a whole outline, but okay. So where would you get the boards? Is was there an ancient friendly local game store? Are these manufactured by the individual who's using them?

Walter 15:54
So that's a very interesting question, and I don't think that there were game shops per se. Usually, what we've seen by observing people who play traditional games similar to this, and you know, with other game types as well, is people will just make it on the ground. So you'll just scratch it either on a pavement, or if if it's just the dirt, you can just make the design in the ground. You gather the pieces. You know, you can get stones or shells or seeds. In some places, they even use animal droppings like goat and sheep.

Brian 16:23
Oh, delightful!

Walter 16:24
Yeah, but that's also why the dice are often binary dice because you can just get sticks and split them in half, and then you have binary dice. You just gather stuff that's around and use them to play the game. And I think most people didn't actually own game boards until fairly later in time, you know the game boards that we see, you know the early Royal Game of Ur boards that you're talking about that were found in ore were found in the Royal Cemetery, you know, made out of semi-precious stones and ivory and stuff like this. This is stuff that the wealthy has, you know, specially made for them.

Jason Wallace 16:56
These are your designer boards, basically. Like you get these nowadays, where they're like they've got metal inlays or mother of pearl, the ones that cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars, which are meant to display and be more of an expression of hey, I spent a lot of money on this rather than something that you would just pull out and play with friends.

Walter 17:12
Exactly, yeah. And the case that I like to talk about is the Tiffany and Company, you know, the famous jewelry store. I don't know if they still do, but they were at one time selling a tic-tac-toe board that was, you know, you could pay several $1,000 for

Brian 17:26
for a game that you can play with, like you know, a scrap of paper.

Walter 17:30
Exactly, it's an expression of status more than anything else.

Brian 17:34
I feel like the same thing is definitely still true with chessboards. People like their extremely elaborate chessboards when you could literally make a chessboard out of just about anything,

Walter 17:42
yeah, absolutely. And I and I mean, even some modern games may not be as much of an expression of wealth to a certain degree. It is, but you know, these games that have tons and tons of components and like are very well made and they cost hundreds of dollars for the box. It's an expression of how dedicated you are to being a gamer, at least right. The

Jason Wallace 18:03
real modern equivalent of that is all the Kickstarter upgrades, where you got the basic game, but then you can upgrade for like the nice metal bits and the ones that have like the inlay on them and all the fancy 3D printed bits instead of paper tokens and such. So

Brian 18:17
this is something that's come up before when a game has a nice feel to it when the tokens have a nice weight to it. It does add a level of satisfaction to the play. It doesn't really change the play, but it changes the player experience.

Walter 18:30
Absolutely.

Jason Wallace 18:30
Yeah. All right. So before we go on to going in depth on the archeology, I do want to do one final thing. One thing I noticed is that when people talk about this game, they oftentimes compare to like checkers or backgammon or ludo, which is one I'm not familiar with. But honestly, playing it, the one that it felt most similar to me was Sorry. So the Milton Bradley game, because you start in a safe spot, you come out to a contested spot where you keep getting knocked back to start, and then there's a final safe spot where you're good and you need to get everyone home. This is actually like the 4,500 year old version of Sorry from anicent Mesopotamia.

Walter 19:03
Well, Sorry is actually just a version of Ludo that's packaged a little differently. That's a funny story because that is Ludo itself was a British "invention" that they actually took from a traditional game called Pachisi in India and marketed it as Ludo, which then spread throughout Europe and the United States with various different names. Yeah, it is this common sort of game mechanism that you see in a lot of these kinds of traditional games, where you start your pieces off the board, you get them on, you interact with the other pieces, knock each other off some safe spaces or whatever, and then get all your pieces to the end. It's a very common sort of easy game mechanism, I think, that you see pop up in a few different places.

Jason Wallace 19:46
So let's dig deep into this. No pun intended. Let's start with the the royal game of Ur first, and then we'll widen it to ancient games and archeology in general. So with this game, we already said it's very old, like 4,500 years old. What's the history of this game that we know in terms of its role in ancient society? Was it mostly for fun? I ran across some things about it being used for divination. Were there other roles displayed in ancient society?

Walter 20:11
Yeah. So I think mostly all games in the ancient world and today are mostly used for fun. There are definitely other kinds of uses or practices that they become part of that come later, as happens with a lot of different kinds of practices. So I think it starts out as something fun. There are some indications that yeah, the divination thing that you're mentioning in maybe some very specific cases it might have been used for some kind of telling the future of some kind. So we have boards for the later version of it that are on the opposite side of a liver-shaped model, and we know from ancient West Asia that sacrificing an animal and looking at its liver and looking at the various deformities and imperfections on the liver were interpreted for some kind of divining what the gods were trying to tell you. So there's some association with it there, very explicitly, but it's not clear that that was always the case, right? We have several versions of this where they are in the courtyards of buildings and they're just scratched on the brick pavements, like at the entrance where guards might have been stationed. I don't think they were doing divination there. I think they were just killing time.

Jason Wallace 21:17
But I do like the idea of like, okay, you want to get in? Let's play a game and see if the gods are in your favor.

Walter 21:17
Yeah, I mean maybe

Brian 21:22
That's more of a DnD thing. That sounds like a DnD thing, Jason.

Walter 21:30
But also, I think games do form, and you could see this at certain points of time that games form a particular kind of social role in helping people to build communities and helping people to interact with one another, especially across different cultural and linguistic boundaries. So, during late Bronze Age, which is from like 1500 to 1000 BCE, you see the later version of the Royal Game of Ur, which is very kind of internationally popular in Egypt. In fact, King Tutankhamun, along with his honey pots, has four versions of this game in his tomb.

Brian 22:00
Big gamer, Tutankhamun, big gamer.

Walter 22:01
Yeah, he was. He was. Yeah, and it was all through West Asia and on the island of Cyprus as well. And it seemed to be particularly popular among the wealthy at this time period and in those places. So it seems to be, and other games as well seem to be a way specifically for facilitating economic interactions with people because you know in this time period, when you are having any kind of trade, you're doing it person to person, and you're building relationships and trying to see if someone is trustworthy, if they're going to rip you off and whatever. And you can kind of get a sense of how people are going to treat you by playing a game with them and seeing, you know, how they play, if they play well, if they're sociable, if they're trying to cheat, if they're, you know if they're sore winner or sore loser this kind of thing you can get a sense of people even without having to use language and when you you get particular games that are widely used in different time periods with different economic systems and like at this particular time period in the late Bronze Age the later version of the Royal Game of Ur that we usually call 20 Squares seems to be this game

Brian 22:47
uh oh Jason you're in trouble then

Jason Wallace 22:54
The fact that I tend to beat you? you won this game though!

Brian 23:04
I did. That gives you a true indication that it's not a game of skill.

Jason Wallace 23:07
Well, it doesn't help that I kept tossing the popsicle sticks and kept getting zero.

Brian 23:14
That's true. We had the variant rule where the zero actually should have been a four, and you can see how these things sort of naturally evolve.

Walter 23:20
That's often in well in the Finkle rules. Yeah, those four zeros is a zero, but in a lot of places where they use the binary dice, there's never a zero. Actually, four zeros would actually be like a five or a six. It's actually so try that next time.

Brian 23:34
Then Jason would have won, as is only right and proper.

Jason Wallace 23:38
Another question. So the board we played on was just a printout I've got from some website. It has all these decorations on it, which I believe are modeled off of sort of the quintessential one I keep seeing from the British Museum-the one with all this lapis lazuli and mother of pearl and such. It has all these different designs scattered over the face, and one of them apparently has a role in some of the rules. It's this rosette. It looks kind of like a little flower. And what I read is that that's the symbol of the goddess Ishtar, and it's considered like a bonus spot. You're safe there. You get to roll again if you land on it. My question is: What are all the other ones? Are they just decor that someone put on there? Do we have any knowledge of if these other spaces or symbols meant anything?

Brian 24:19
And they're different in different amounts. Like there's one square that is only represented once. There's a couple that it's three or four. It seems like it's obviously there's something else intended here. Otherwise, why have this arrangement?

Walter 24:30
I mean, it's a very it's kind of a one of one object. This one in the British Museum that they are modeled after. We have several 100 examples of this kind of game, and if you look at all of the squares on all of the different boards and how they are marked. The only squares that are consistently marked across the whole dataset, they are the ones where the rosettes fall in that particular board. We have some where none are marked, and there are only a couple others. I think two others that were also found at Ur, in which every square is decorated in some way. But not in the same pattern as the one on that, so you know it's not like the ones that match up are in the same position. It's not that at all. So it does seem like only the rosettes are the ones that matter on that board because they are in the positions that are also marked in other ways, usually by an X in the simpler boards. So it does seem like those are the only way that they were done, and the you know the ways that they are arranged and have similar patterns is probably just for aesthetics and you know symmetry and that kind of thing.

Brian 25:27
Artistic liberty,

Walter 25:28
exactly.

Jason Wallace 25:29
And so, what were some of the other games that were contemporary with this? I mean, contemporary being like a multi-1000-year time frame, but what are the other games that were floating around the ancient world, presumably, like the ancient Mediterranean area, while this was being out and being played.

Walter 25:45
Yeah, and like you said, there are several 1000s of years where this was played, but we actually only know a few games that were played over that couple 1000 year spread of time. Probably, like I said, because people would play most games just in the ground, and that's never going to preserve archeologically, right? So we only get the ones where people bother to make something, and these are usually games that people with some kind of wealth and power would have made, or that the game had some kind of importance for making it in a certain way. So some of these games, probably the most famous one is the Egyptian game Senet, which is a little bit older than the Royal Game of Ur. It goes back at least to 3000 BCE. Now that's probably, aside from the Royal Game of Ur, is probably the most famous of all of the ancient board games. You know, it's three rows of 10 spaces. At a certain point in time, it's really closely related to the idea of the passage of the soul from the point of death into the afterlife in ancient Egypt, and it also spread to different places down into Nubia, which is now Sudan, up the coast of the Mediterranean into Cyprus as well. There's the game of Mehen, which is also Egyptian, which is the earliest game that we know the actual name of. I should say that we call the Royal Game of Ur the Royal Game of Ur because we don't know its actual ancient name. We call it that because it was found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, the City of Ur. But Mehen and Senet, we do know the names of them because they are named ancient Egyptian texts. And Mehen is older than Senet; it goes back to the middle or first half of the fourth millennium BCE, and that is in the form of a coiled snake. So it's basically a spiral that is often depicted as a snake in the actual boards. That lasts until about 2000 BCE in Egypt.

Brian 27:23
Instead of snakes and ladders, it's just snake and snake.

Walter 27:25
It's just a snake, yeah. Okay,

Brian 27:26
just snake.

Walter 27:27
And the other major one is you'll see it sometimes called hounds and jackals, but it's also known as 58 holes because it has 58 holes. It's another one where we don't know the ancient name. It's sometimes called hounds and jackals because there's a fancy board that's now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York that has so the board itself is a series of holes in which you stick pegs and the pegs have dog and jackal heads on them so that's hounds and jackals. But that game was popular from like the beginning of the second millennium up through the end of the first millennium, basically. Also mostly in West Asia, but also in Egypt and in the Caucasus, actually, in like Azerbaijan, I did some research on that. Some examples of the game that were found there. So those are the major games of like West Asia and the Mediterranean, and then you know, starting in the first millennium, you start to see new games showing up from the Greek and Roman world. But that's a whole separate thing.

Brian 28:16
It's fascinating to try to imagine how were these games created, spread, and then popularized. Right.

Jason Wallace 28:22
Actually, the question I have is, how did they die? Like, if something was this widespread and this popular, how did it stop being played, or why?

Walter 28:32
I mean, that's a really good question. So, I think it has a lot to do with how the game is being sustained. Right. Nobody's writing down the rules, it's just going person to person, and you have communities that are built around certain kinds of ways of playing. You know, communities that know how to play a particular game and like to play a particular game in a certain way. So, I actually had a book chapter that just came out in the past couple weeks where I kind of track how this changes from the beginning of the Bronze Age to the end of the Bronze Age with the games that I just talked about: Mehen, Senet, 20 Squares, Royal Game of Ur, and 58 Holes. Because you see the games kind of originate in a particular place, and then sometimes they become very widely popular across the region, and then they kind of go back to where they originated from. And this seems to mirror particular economic systems that kind of spread and then collapse and then stop existing. So at certain points of time, you get a new economic system that spreads across the region. You have new networks of people interacting with one another, and they all are playing the same game. But then, when that network falls apart, you may still have the people who played that game outside of where it originated. They may still know it. They may try to play it with other people, but there isn't as much an impetus to do it because the system which was perpetuating the game has kind of fallen apart. It's not the you know the game is the way to communicate with people you're trading with, and you see that you know it's Senet and the Royal Game of Ur in two different parts of West Asia in the third millennium in the beginning. The second millennium, it's 58 holes that's everywhere. Seems to start in Mesopotamia and then spread everywhere. Then that system collapses, and then that goes back to Mesopotamia, and then 20 squares, the later version of Royal Game of Ur, becomes the regionally popular one in the late Bronze Age, and then it collapses. But then, of course, the question is, what happens to the Royal Game of Ur? You know, at the end of this, it was popular in Mesopotamia for millennia. But then, where did it go? That's a hard question because we stop seeing it in the archeological record. But it's hard to say why. You can maybe tie it to different kinds of gaming culture that seem to be coming about in the at the end of the first millennium. So you know, after Mesopotamia becomes part of the Greek world after the conquest of Alexander the Great, we start to see maybe not specifically in Mesopotamia, but in other parts of West Asia, we start to see games that the Greeks were playing start to appear. We also start to see during the Roman Empire there are particular Roman games appearing in West Asia, and then also you get games like Backgammon, which seem to come from Iran a little bit later showing up. So just like today, you don't see as many people playing Monopoly as you do Catan, for instance. Taste in games can change, and the networks of people who are playing games that can like sustain the transmission of games. It's almost an evolutionary process, kind of. You have to keep reproducing it in order for it to continue on. And at some point, when people either decide they want to play a new game, or potentially something about the game changes to something that is not recognizable archeologically as the same game, like maybe the geometry changes in some way that it looks like a completely different game to us. But because we don't know the rules, because they were never written down, we can't say, "Oh, this is clearly a derivation of that one.

Walter 31:43
Yeah, there's all different ways, but it's hard to understand what happens on either end of when a game board is played in the archeological record because we only start to see it after people are already playing it. We never are able to see the process of somebody inventing it and making it. We see it once everybody's playing it and they're making things, and then we can see the point where the last one existed, but we don't have accounts of people saying like, "Oh, we like this game so much better. So yeah, it's hard to tell.

Brian 32:08
So you've got the new hotness, but it's generational.

Walter 32:10
Kind of, yeah.

Jason Wallace 32:12
Basically, you've got game fads and influencers, but we're on talking on the scale of centuries instead of months or years.

Brian 32:18
Yeah, there's no archeological records of the Kickstarters to get the new game going,

Jason Wallace 32:22
or their designer diaries, which brings up another question I had talking about the archeological record and then what actually happened in history. Are ancient games like this these let's call them board games? Are they essentially tied up with civilization? Because all the ones we talked about were tied to civilizations that had developed like an agricultural base and a hierarchical structured society and such. Are they tied to that, or is that just the type of civilization that can make something that we can find?

Walter 32:53
I think it's the second thing because the interesting fact that I mentioned that there is now evidence that people were using dice up to 12,000 years ago in the Americas, that's long before there was ever a kind of a state level society or any kind of hierarchies existing in North America, right? So coupling that with what we have observed ethnographically from people you know all around the world playing traditional games and how they just use the stuff that's around them to play with, these are things that we are never going to be able to find archeologically very easily. So the things that we can definitely say are game boards really start to appear in the archeological record when we have people who are making a lot of things to use for various different purposes. You know, you have people who are making very large permanent buildings and are using pottery instead of skins to carry things, and you know all kinds of various other things. They're also taking the time to make things specifically to play with, and it is in a way related to things like agricultural base because you're using agriculture as your subsistence base, but that also requires you to kind of be sedentary, living in one space, and that affords you to have more things that you don't have to carry around all the time, like you would as a hunter gatherer. So you don't want to be carrying around your big fancy chessboard as a hunter gatherer because you have other stuff you want to carry. But if you have a place where you're living all year round, you can you know store it away in your house. But also, it is I think related to the fact that you are starting to get some kind of social stratification. People people who are more wealthy than others, and who are showing off their wealth by having specific things that are meant for playing, and it's an idea of like conspicuous leisure that was talked about in the 19th century in the Victorian setting, where you know it's more about people who don't have to work and do all of this. It's I think related to that as well.

Brian 34:39
It seems like it's just again thinking about how humans are. We've probably been playing games as long as we've been modern humans. I don't imagine that there'd ever be any evidence of this, but of modern humans, you know, teaching games to Neanderthals and vice versa.

Walter 34:54
It depends on how you want to think about games, right? I mean, games are just kind of a more rule-bound. Form of play, and we know that we were playing before we were even humans, right? Animals play. We see dogs and cats play. So that's not unique to humans. So it very well could be possible that you know we're learning so much more. It seems as time goes on about how much more complex Neanderthals were than we thought they were. They were engaging in symbolic behavior and this kind of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they had the mental capacity to be able to play some kind of simple board games.

Brian 35:27
But either scratching it into the ground, you know what I mean? Just getting together to trade, or like people out on a hunt, just like passing the time, playing tic-tac-toe in the dirt,

Walter 35:37
or even just using dice. Maybe they were gambling. Who knows? It would be really hard to see that it has been brought up at certain points in time that there is sort of this requirement of a certain level of human cognition that is necessary to play games that sort of arises with social complexity. You know that idea of states and all of this, which I I don't think that that plays out.

Jason Wallace 35:57
I mean, it's a sort of thing that an issue with archaeologies we are limited to what actually gets preserved archeologically,

Brian 36:03
right? It's like the fossil record in paleontology. It's like you only get what's preserved.

Walter 36:07
Yep.

Jason Wallace 36:08
And so with that, so Walter, when you are doing archeology on ancient games, what does that look like? Are you digging ancient game boards out of the dirt and sand? Is it looking at translated tablets? Like, what does that actually look like.

Brian 36:21
How much time do you get to spend playing the games?

Walter 36:24
Not as much time playing the games as you might think. There are various different ways to go about it in terms of the actual like going and trying to excavate sites to find games. That's a hard thing to do. I have found games on archeological excavations, but it was never sort of the point of like, oh, let's go excavate this site because we think we'll find games that has not yet been done. Maybe sometime in the future. For instance, recently, one thing that we did. So last month, I was working was co-leading a field project in the city of Rome and also its port city of Ostia, its port city during the Roman Empire, where we know that there were games that were scratched as graffiti on many of the ancient Roman monuments, but they were poorly documented. So we went there and we surveyed, you know, a ton of the different monuments in Rome and the entire ancient city of Ostia for the graffiti games that were scratched on pavements there. So basically, what we did was we went out day after day. I focused on Ostia mainly, so day after day, I went there and just looked at all of the pavements in the hundreds of rooms in that city, and looked for graffiti that looked like the ancient games that we know about, and maybe even some that we don't necessarily know about, and just document where they are, photograph them, do all the kind of proper archeological documentation that we need to do. Then we will then analyze that later on. Other kinds of things that I have done is a lot of it has to do with analyzing museum collections. So a lot of things have been found that are probably games that were either misidentified or not identified as games at various archeological excavations in the past, or purchased on the art market when that was legal to do by museums, and they're just kind of misidentified or unidentified, and just going and observing and measuring and analyzing the actual objects to properly identify and contextualize them. So there's been a lot of that going on. And another thing that I've been doing recently is trying to use AI to figure out how some of these games might have been played. So instead of playing them myself, I'm making the AI do it.

Jason Wallace 38:27
So I really wanted to talk about this, but before I do, I want to go back to these graffiti games. So when you talk about graffiti games, is this like tic-tac-toe where they they carve it in and it's played once and that's it, or is this like carving a checkerboard into it, so you could just play it whenever you wanted.

Walter 38:43
It's more like a checkerboard. In fact, some of the ones that we found in Ostia were like a Roman game called Ludus Duodecum Scriptorum, which means the game of 12 signs, which seems to be an ancestor of backgammon. And it, you know, it's not just a quick grid that you would make for tic-tac-toe. It's 36 different spaces that are aligned in a certain way on quite a large thing, so it seems to be something that would be made and then returned to and played, you know, over time. And you know, also some of these are in like people's dining rooms, so it's not like it was just something like on the side. It's where people in people's homes where they were obviously making this a place where they would play, and it's sort of the equivalent of what I was talking about about how people just like make it on the games with what's available. Well, if the place where you're living is paved, then you can make it one time, and then that becomes a place where you can return to to play. What's also interesting is we did find several clearly modern tic-tac-toe boards that kids who were there for their school trips made, and we documented those too because that's also an interesting way that modern people are playing in these ancient sites.

Brian 39:45
It's a little bit like the chessboard tables that are set up in a public park, right? The board's just always there. You come, you bring your pieces, you play.

Walter 39:52
Exactly that. Yeah.

Jason Wallace 39:54
All right. So let's get to talking about AI because we actually just finished recording, and as we're recording this episode. We're in the middle of releasing a four-part series on teaching computers how to play games, where we talk about like the evolution of computer algorithms and AI to try to tackle different games: tic-tac-toe, chess, Go, and other things. And of course, Minecraft-you know, the best game. I did see that you were working on this, which almost seems like the opposite. If I understood what you're doing right, you've made some sort of like gaming language, and you're now using AI not to teach it to play ancient games, but to get it to test out a bunch of rule sets to figure out which ones were likely used in ancient games. Is that right? Like, what are you? How is this working out?

Walter 40:36
That is basically what we're doing. So I will say that it wasn't me that created the language; it was the computer scientists that I work with that did that. But yeah, it has been something that we've been working on. So as you've noticed for the Royal Game of Ur, that there are a lot of different people who are interested in learning how to play these games or trying to play these games, and they make rules for them. But it's often not clear what the decision-making process is when people do these reconstructions, right? Even for Finkel, you know, who has probably the most well-reasoned and historically plausible rule set, the the decision-making process isn't kind of laid out explicitly, and there have been some interesting questions about particular games in the archeological record, some ambiguities within what we know about those games that we have tried to use game playing AIs to test these questions. So, for example, one that we did was on a Roman game called Ludus Latrunculorum, or the game of little soldiers, which is played on a grid board. We know from the Roman sources that it's played on a grid, but the Roman authors don't tell us the size of the grid. We found lots of different grids from Roman era sites all over the empire, and even some that are like just outside the empire that range from six by six up to 18 by 18. You often do see some variation in these kinds of traditional games, but usually not that much variation. That's a pretty small grid to a quite a large one. So we took from the Roman sources the rules that we know for this game, which in terms of ancient games is quite a lot of the rules because the Latin authors use this game as metaphor for various certain things, and talked about various game mechanisms for metaphors for other things. So we we know quite a bit. We know that the pieces move vertically and horizontally. We don't know if it was one at a time or like a rook in chess. We know how pieces capture one another. We know the goal is to capture your opponent's pieces, and we know that the pieces start off the board and have to be placed on. That's kind of enough to make a game. So we basically put those rules on all of the different board sizes that we found. We had AIs play them, and we basically tracked how long the games lasted for. We tracked the percentage of the pieces belonging to each player that were on the board at every given turn, and we tracked that for all of the different board sizes with these different rules, and what we found basically is that once you hit a 10 by 10 grid, anything bigger than that, these rules kind of break down, and the game just lasts for 1000s and 1000s of turns, including, and that could be attributed to AIs just playing in very AI-like ways, not even stupid ways, but like ways that humans wouldn't, because AIs are always trying to play to win or at least not to lose. AIs can find a strategy to make the game go on and on and on forever and not lose, and they don't care.

Brian 43:08
Yeah,

Walter 43:08
humans might find that, but there will be social pressure for them to bring the game to an end.

Brian 43:13
Yeah, a human wants to go eat a sandwich at some point.

Walter 43:15
You want to go eat a sandwich? You want to go to the bathroom? You don't want to play like a jerk. Like all of these things, and. And you, you also might want to try to win, even though it might give you a chance of losing. Right, a human will take more risks than

Brian 43:28
you'll take more risks. Okay, so this just I'm trying to learn here. That's ethnography. That's thinking like a human's not going to play this game for 10 hours. Although we know some weirdos who will play a game for an entire weekend, but but

Jason Wallace 43:39
they will still take bathroom breaks.

Brian 43:40
They will take bathroom breaks,

Walter 43:42
but they're also not just going to move the same piece back and forth, back and forth.

Brian 43:45
No, no, no, no. That's boring. That's boring.

Walter 43:47
Yeah, exactly.

Brian 43:48
I guess AIs don't get bored.

Walter 43:50
So that is partially, I think, what's happening there with the AIs. But there are also on the larger board hundreds of turns where there's no progression toward the end. Like one player will gain the advantage and hold it, and there will be no captures for 500 turns. It's just not feasible for these larger boards.

Jason Wallace 44:09
It's a boring game. That's that's not going to be transmitted because people don't enjoy that experience.

Walter 44:14
Exactly. So those larger boards are probably, and if you look at the geographic distribution where they were found, they tend to be on the edges, on the borders of the empire, or just outside. And we know that the Roman military was hiring troops from outside the empire as auxiliary troops. So these are probably games that were played by the indigenous peoples, I think, of Northwest Europe, particularly that were brought into the military and are playing. You know this other game that the authors in Rome are not writing about, so we don't know what the rules are. That have some other kind of rules that are more amenable to this larger kind of game, because there are traditional board games that are played on large boards, but you know there are different rules that allow for that large kind of space.

Jason Wallace 44:56
Yeah, Go is a 19 by 19 grid.

Walter 44:58
Yeah, exactly. There's also the medieval game that the Vikings played Nefertafel, which is on like 13 by 13. So, point is that these larger ones are probably not the Roman game; they're probably something else. And we've looked at other things too with AI. So, there was one particular object in a local museum here in the Netherlands that was identified as a game on the exhibit, but it had a pattern on it that I had not seen in any other kind of traditional game before, so I was kind of skeptical about it. But then I could see on it that so it has this pattern of lines on it, and then along one of the lines, especially, you could see where it was worn smooth, and the area that was worn smooth is about the diameter of a Roman gaming piece. You know, about an inch wide, two centimeters. That okay, that's interesting. So what we use AI to sort of test whether this could have been produced by gameplay, because it's very kind of asymmetrical. Like the rest of the board kind of looks the same, but in this one spot, it's really worn. So, we wanted to see if we could find rules for a game played on a small board like this that would replicate movement like that, where the movement along this line would be disproportionate to use along the rest of the board. So we found rules for some different kinds of games from historical contexts in Europe, which are mostly like more complex versions of tic-tac-toe, where you don't just put your pieces in a line, but then if you don't make three in a row, then you take turns moving them to try to get three in a row. Or some games where you have one player has more pieces than the other, and the player with more pieces tries to block the player with fewer pieces, and then you switch roles and then try to do it again in the player who lasts the longest as the player with fewer pieces wins.

Brian 46:31
Oh, cool! Like an asymmetric game.

Walter 46:33
Yeah, yeah, an asymmetric game exactly. And so we took 138 different variations of these rules and put them on the board. Well, on variations of the board because it's not always clear how the lines line up because it was very sloppily made. Ancient people did, ancient people did this. This is not a weird thing. And while we weren't able to narrow it down to one particular rule set, there was a suite of nine that were very similar to each other that were all this kind of blocking game, the asymmetrical game. So it seems like that's what was going on with that object. So we're kind of using AI to find ways to look at the archeological record of games in a different way to try to model what possible behaviors people might have been using these objects for, and kind of using that as a new kind of line of evidence to point to what games might be played on these particular boards, because it's not always clear, you know, just going from what texts we have and what objects we have a lot. That's really

Brian 47:30
cool. Just from the layout of the board and the wear patterns and inferences from similar games.

Walter 47:35
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Wallace 47:36
So I've got two last questions for you, Walter. The first one is going to start with an invitation to our listeners: like, go out and get one of these ancient games and play it, and become part of a multi-1000-year human tradition of playing these games. But related to that, Walter, what can we as modern humans in our modern society? What do we get from these games? What do we learn from having these out there, or playing them, or studying about them, like you do,

Walter 48:00
I think the most powerful thing about ancient games is the way that it's a an ancient practice that has not really changed very much in the past 5000 years, as far as we can tell. You can put the royal game of Ur in front of somebody and the pieces and the dice, and you give them a couple pointers, but they know exactly what to do with it, right? They know to throw the dice, they know how to count. They know it has to go, you know, along this track to get off the pieces. It's very much similar to the way that people play games now. Now, of course, we have a lot more complex games now that are very popular. But at the basic level, you're throwing dice. You're moving pieces on it in through a geometrically defined space that's intuitive to us now, and it's often something that has not really been talked about in terms of how ancient life was. We kind of have this view of ancient life that it was, you know, everyone struggling to survive at all times, and like it was a very rough and difficult existence, which to a certain degree it was. But people also found ways and had time to have fun, and I think that really humanizes the past for me. I think, and for a lot of people, and the fact that it is so fundamental to game playing, and it is something that is still instinctual to us now, I think, is really cool, and it is a really effective way to connect people to the past than other kind of more abstract practices, which may be harder to replicate. Right, you can like have recipes or you know ways of making clothing or pottery in ancient ways, but I think that's harder to access for people than just playing a game. It's really simple.

Brian 49:26
So sitting, laughing, playing, talking-that's we've been doing that forever,

Walter 49:32
forever. Like that has not changed. Yeah, and we have like ancient Egyptian tomb paintings of people trash talking each other. Like it's all the same.

Jason Wallace 49:42
Things really have not changed. Then, no,

Walter 49:45
they really haven't.

Jason Wallace 49:46
All right, last question: What's your favorite ancient game? So

Walter 49:50
I think Senet is my favorite ancient game. It's the one that I keep sort of coming back to. It's so interesting to me that it was this game that was played for 3000 years. And spread to different cultures. So I first got interested in ancient games by studying them in Cyprus because I was particularly interested in Egypt, and this game had come to Cyprus, and I thought that was really interesting. And the fact that this was a game that pharaohs were playing, but also people who were living in these villages on this faraway island were also playing the same game. I thought that was really cool. And yeah, just kind of like the mythology and the symbolism behind it that comes later on in time is really interesting to me, and yeah, I just find it fascinating.

Brian 50:30
So the four games in your chapter were Senet, Royal Game of Ur, Hounds and Jackals, and what was the last one?

Walter 50:35
Mehen, the spiral one.

Brian 50:37
Oh, the snake, snake and snake.

Walter 50:39
Yeah, snake and snake. Exactly.

Brian 50:41
I really wish that I could just support on Kickstarter. I would just want a set of those games. It would be really fun.

Jason Wallace 50:47
The Ancient Games Bundle

Brian 50:48
Ancient Games Bundle, like you know, with the kind of nice pieces and quality and all that stuff. Like not museum quality.

Walter 50:55
You can find some probably most of these out there for sale in some form or another. Yeah.

Jason Wallace 51:00
Now the way we usually wrap up our show is that we're professors. We give grades, grade on science and a grade on fun. I don't think we can give a science grade to the Royal Game of Ur. That's again not applicable. We usually have to talk about science, but there's no science in the game itself. But I do think we can grade it on fun, and I'm going to throw this to Brian first. What did you think?

Brian 51:20
We don't usually play games this light. I think this is the first time we've sat down and played a game where we can just like have a conversation. Maybe like harmonies is a little bit like that, where it's kind of not too brain burny. Like you can, Jason doesn't drink, but I do, and just sit and hang out and play a game together. I don't know. I guess I'm just gonna stick with a B. It seems like this would make a fun filler game, like a game to play between two other brain burny games. Or again, like while we're sitting down and just eating snacks.

Jason Wallace 51:47
Yeah, I can see that. I talk about how Uno is a very popular game. I talk about when I play Uno, I don't play Uno to actually play Uno. I play Uno to have a social time with my friends and be doing something with my hands at the same time. This seems

Brian 51:58
you play Uno to trash talk people and give them problems.

Jason Wallace 52:04
Okay, fair. Walter, what about you? As the expert on the air right now, where would you put this in terms of fun? Would you choose to play Royal Game of Ur with friends?

Brian 52:16
I guess we already know Senet. It's your favorite, so

Walter 52:18
yeah. I mean,

Jason Wallace 52:19
but you can't play that. We don't have the rules.

Walter 52:21
Well, it's true. I mean, there we have ideas about the rules. I mean, for me, it starts getting to the point where it's like, okay, is this fun or is this work for me? Because I'm constantly thinking about the Royal game of Ur. But I do find that it is fun, like you say, like it allows you to have more of this kind of interaction around the game rather than the game itself, and for that reason, I think for my own self, and I think for historically people who have played games have not always been this hardcore gamer, right? So for that, I would give it a B+. I think. Okay,

Jason Wallace 52:56
I think I put it in about the same area. B, B+. This is a light filler game. I know reading over the rule set. I think I'd actually prefer one called the Masters rule set rather than the Finkel rule set, just because it has certain things about where you go around the board that makes the rosette tiles be placed more evenly and uses three dice instead of four and stuff. I think solid B to B+ seems good. It's like this is like Brian said, a good filler game. This is not something like oh I just can't wait to play Ur again. I was like, we just burned our brain out playing Ark Nova. What do we need as a good breather while our brain cells recover, so we can do something else?

Brian 53:29
The one thing about the Finkle rules is needing that exact roll to get your pieces off. Do you remember? You almost caught up to me. I was almost ready to go and could not roll a one to save my life.

Jason Wallace 53:38
Yeah, I'm sure people were house rolling it for 1000s of years. I'm sure we can make up whatever ones we want as well.

Walter 53:44
Exactly.

Jason Wallace 53:45
Well, I think that's where we're going to wrap it up here, Walter. Thank you very much for coming on. Is there anything of yours that you want to plug or ways people can find you online?

Walter 53:53
Probably the best way to find me is on Blue Sky. I'm Waltros at Blue Sky. Whatever the Blue Sky handles are. Yeah, I have various articles out there. The one on using the AI to look at the U square on the board was just out in Journal Antiquity, so check that out. Another thing we developed with some students here is a playable video game of Senet that you can download on Steam. It's called Senet Households, and basically the idea is you're a traveler to ancient Egypt, and you learn this game from a child, and then you work your way up through various kind of rule sets and difficulties up to playing against the pharaoh.

Brian 54:29
That sounds cool.

Walter 54:30
It's cool, and it's a different kind of take on how to play these ancient games. So that's available for free on Steam.

Jason Wallace 54:35
That's interesting because it's almost a meta game. It's a game about playing games.

Walter 54:39
Yeah, exactly.

Jason Wallace 54:40
Well, thank you very much. So, listeners, hope you enjoyed. Again, you can print off Ur for the price of a little bit of toner. Grab some random rocks or glass stones or whatever you have lying around. We used checkers.

Brian 54:52
Those little pyramid dice are really cool, though. I want some of those little pyramid dice.

Jason Wallace 54:55
Yes, they are. So, in the meantime, have fun. Have a great month and great games.

Brian 55:00
And have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

Jason Wallace 55:05
This has been the Gaming with Science podcast, copyright 2026. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non-commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Game with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing Dice with the Universe.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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S3E06 - The Royal Game of Ur (Ancient Games)

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