An old game I found :)

For those of you who know me, you know that I'm a bit of an Archaeology fan. I love ancient languages and dabble in them, and I like to do research on ancient cultures and places. Perhaps this comes from studying the Bible as I have and teaching classes on Archaeology, but there it is.

I came across an ancient Egyptian game called Senet and figured I'd try playing it. This game is one of the oldest board games in the world. Ancient Egyptians, from the Pharaohs and their wives, to the common Egyptian man, played this game. To them it represented something of one's journey to the afterlife and some believed that if you won, you would have no problem on your journey after death.

As old as this game is, no one knows how to play it. There were never any records, and I presume this is because EVERYONE knew how to play and therefore did not need instruction. Despite the lack of records, different people have speculated and come up with different ways of playing. The link below is to a PDF with Kendall's rules and a board to play on. This game is for two players, so you'll need 14 pieces to represent the seven pawns of each player. You could use two kinds of coins. You'll also need 4 sticks. You could use popsicle sticks and draw some kind of mark on the tops of each, but the sticks should be flat. You can even use coins and count how many times "heads" shows up. If all sides show "heads", you move five spaces and can flip again.

The rules are pretty simple. Place the game pieces on tiles 1-14 of the board. Your goal is to get all your pieces off the board. If, while moving pieces, you should land on your opponent's piece (or vice versa), the your pieces will exchange places (meaning their piece moves where your's started). There are five special spaces; 15 and 26-29. Each piece has its restrictions and functions. If you pass square 15, you will not have to move further back than this square. No one can exchange pieces with a piece on this space. The same thing goes for space 26. If you land on space 27 you must move your tile all the way back to space 15. If you land on space 28 you may only leave if you roll a three. If you land on square 29 you may only leave if you roll a 2.

So, if you are bored and have been staring at your computer screen refreshing your twitter or facebook page over and over again, don't! Try entertaining yourself the way the Ancient Egyptians would. Or better yet, pick up your Bible and read something! The story of Joseph and Moses is pretty interesting :)

http://legacy.mos.org/quest/pdf/senet.pdf