Roll the four ancient dice, send your seven pieces around the track, and bear them all home before your rival.
The Royal Game of Ur is a Mesopotamian race game roughly 4,600 years old. Each player runs seven pieces along a track and tries to bear them all off the board first. You roll four binary dice — each shows 0 or 1 — so every cast moves a piece 0 to 4 squares.
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board games ever found — its surviving boards date to roughly 2600–2400 BC. The archaeologist Leonard Woolley unearthed them in the Royal Cemetery of the Sumerian city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, in the 1920s. For a long time the rules were lost, until a Babylonian clay tablet from about 177 BC, decoded by British Museum curator Irving Finkel, revealed how it was played. The game spread across the ancient Near East and is a distant ancestor of the race games that led to backgammon.
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, a dice race excavated from ancient Mesopotamia. This is an original, free browser recreation with a CPU opponent, pass-and-play, and online matches — no download or sign-up.