My iterations of The Royal Game of UR

Recently I had to write an essay about iterating an ancient board game from the 2600BC period. This is the oldest known game to man and I found this one of the most interesting games I've had to study. The game consists of a set of nets which combine to be the game board which the players have to manoeuvre around to get the end to score a piece. The players roll a set of 4 D4 dice with 2 sides marked in order to move around the board, this gives the game an element of chance with these game bits. The game board was found to have specially decorated cells and consistently throughout there was found to have a rosette square believed to have importance with the game play.

My task was to iterate the current mechanics of the game to improve the games overall playability. But before we can iterate the rules, what were the rules?
 The most basic rules are currently considered to be these:

• Using four sided dice, each players moves their pieces around the board, the player must roll the exact number to leave the board.
• If a piece lands on a marked rosette square(one with a star on it in this case) the player receives another go.
• If a piece lands on a square with an opposition piece on it, the piece is removed from the board and must restart.
• A piece on a marked rosette square cannot be taken.
• First player to get all 7 pieces to the end wins the game.

Board diagram:

My iterations of these rules were and why:

Players were able to stack two game pieces on top of one another and move them simultaneously, the player was only allowed a maximum of two stacked, this was because when we played by the original rules the game lasted too long and so we iterated this so that we could speed the game time up.
Players who landed on the rosette square were not allowed to stay on there, they had to roll and move that piece instantly, this was iterated as players began to 'camp' on the rosette squares and it became frustrating for the other player.
Because of both these iterations, it created another problem with the game dynamics, players began to put stacks on rosette squares which gave them the ability to move their stacked pieces up the board too fast, so we made a mechanic which stopped the players from putting stacked pieces on rosette squares. From these iterations we found the game ran faster, yet not too fast. It made the game more enjoyable to play.



Game board image: http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/ps121289_m.jpg