Sunday, 15 March 2015

Ancient Games: Senet

In this lecture, we were given the opportunity to play a board game from ancient Egypt; amazingly it still stood the test of time by being pretty enjoyable. The rules were fairly simple, though the dice mechanics were somewhat bizarre. Having to utilize what was effectively a 3-sided die for movement was something that I wasn't even certain existed (Though the knowledge of ancient cultures using the knuckle bones of animals as dice was a very interesting fact).

Initially, there were some small hiccups related to the rules: I would sometimes perceive a rule differently to my opponent, which would result in us having to spend about 5 minutes sifting through the rules to find any clarification, but always these issues were rendered moot once we found something hidden away in the rule set.

It wasn't soon after these clarifications that me and my opponent ended up devising our own little tactics in how to play; blocking off movement for other pieces, securing a location and preventing pieces from being swapped around, and the occasional muttered threat towards an unlucky die. All in all, Senet (Or at least the version of the rules we played, the actual full rules of the game have unfortunately not been recovered) was a very surprising show of how a well structured game can still be played thousands of years after its conception.

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