The History of the Royal Game of Ur
One of the oldest board games ever discovered.
Buried with Kings in Mesopotamia
Five gameboards were excavated between 1922 and 1934 by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq - hence the game's name. Made of wood inlaid with shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone, they were buried alongside Sumerian royalty around 2600-2400 BCE.
The game clearly wasn't confined to Mesopotamia: boards and fragments with the same distinctive shape have turned up as far away as Crete, Sri Lanka and Egypt, where a related game evolved into what's known today as Twenty Squares.
A Ruleset Lost, Then Found
For thousands of years, nobody knew how the game was actually played - the boards survived, but the rules didn't. That changed thanks to a Babylonian clay tablet, written around 177 BCE by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu, which recorded the rules in cuneiform as a kind of ancient rulebook.
It took until the 1980s for British Museum curator Irving Finkel to fully translate and reconstruct the ruleset from that tablet - the same rules used in this app, more than 4,400 years after the game was first buried.
A Surprise 21st-Century Revival
The Royal Game of Ur remained a niche curiosity among historians until it found a huge new audience in 2017, when Irving Finkel taught the rules to popular YouTuber Tom Scott in a video that has since been watched tens of millions of times.
That video sparked a small renaissance: dedicated fan sites, tournaments, and digital versions (including this one) now let anyone play a game that was already ancient by the time the pyramids of Giza were being built.