The History of Senet
One of the oldest board games ever found - and one whose exact rules have been lost for thousands of years.
Predynastic Origins
Senet boards and pieces have been found in Egyptian graves dating back to around 3100 BCE, making it one of the oldest known board games in the world - predating even the Royal Game of Ur by several centuries. The name means roughly "the game of passing" in ancient Egyptian.
Early boards were etched into stone or scratched onto furniture; later, elaborately carved and inlaid Senet sets became treasured possessions of Egyptian nobility, buried alongside their owners for the afterlife.
From Pastime to the Afterlife
By the New Kingdom (around 1550-1070 BCE), Senet had taken on deep religious significance: it was reinterpreted as a symbolic journey of the soul through the underworld toward rebirth, and its squares were given names - the House of Rebirth, the House of Beauty, the House of Water - referencing hazards and blessings on that journey.
The most famous depiction is a wall painting from the tomb of Queen Nefertari (13th century BCE), showing her playing Senet alone - a scene understood as ensuring safe passage through the afterlife rather than simple leisure.
A Board Without a Rulebook
No ancient text describing Senet's exact rules has ever been found. Everything played today, including PaperGames's version, is a modern reconstruction pieced together from board layouts, the number of pieces found in burials, and later Greco-Roman boards that show related games with recorded rules.
Egyptologist Timothy Kendall's 1978 reconstruction is one of the most widely used starting points for these modern rule sets, though - unlike a solved game such as Connect Four - there's no way to know how closely any of them match how Senet was actually played three thousand years ago.