Ur and Senet: Ancient Games with little understanding.

Ur and Senet are games of which seem little understood about them truly, as many different interpretations of rulings such as starting, the amount of counters.
Looking at Ur first, found by Sir Leonard Wolley as he excavated three complete boards, and "the halves of at least two more [...] in addition to many fragments of loose inlay pieces which must have belonged to gaming boards too." (Becker 2007 p .11).

The game was then looked at by Murray, Bell , and Becker to try and iterate them to make the game in a playable state, but they all looked at elements that were unknown to us in till some rules on a clay tablet was found and read to a mild understanding but some mechanics are still unknown or unexplained. Overall from the rules we used for the game made the game rather enjoyable as we iterated the dice mechanic to increase speed of the game and made it easier the counting 4 sided dice with a white tip for are score of the dice (Using this sort of style of dice would have made more sense back then, however now we have dice that really do the job for use and make sure we are not wasting time counting which is or is not a 1 or a 0).

Then we looked at the game Senet, a race game with the mechanic of blocking players and has a very spiritual being, Senet was found to be an interesting game as the rules seemed a lot more fleshed out and we have found a lot more of the game pieces and boards to figure out how it would have played.
Whilst playing Senet, I slowly saw how the game was more blocking focused as both players would rather block players from moving then race ahead, and because of this the game seemed much slower then it actually was, for example the player may have got them self a piece to the square 28 but after a lot of turns the player would forget about the piece as it needed to have a 3 to move and leave the board, making players go back to moving pieces back at the start of the game and not paying attention to the roll and where they move the piece from or to; More and more making the players try to block them and stop progression rather then race to the end.

A simple yet can be fun game with the right mind set and right players, however I enjoyed Ur more, it was somehow more fun to play and you saw progression a lot more, making the game feel more faster and fun, building up the players different strategies and how they used the game pieces, personally I wanted to get one piece though and then another there for having a full focus on a single piece, however the rush idea to get all the pieces on the board and clutter the board also worked for my opponent as the game work well with both, and then the taking of pieces or the safe squares which gave another turn to the player, made the game flow faster then it really was.

Thus I believe both games are enjoyable but if there was a choice it would much be a Royal game of Ur I would rather play.

Bibliography:

Becker, A (2007) "The Royal Game of Ur" in Finkel ed.pp. 11-15.