The Royal Game of Ur.
Roughly 4,500 years old — a race for two, carried across a board of twenty squares. You and the machine each run seven pieces home; land on a ✦ rosette to roll again and sit safe, and catch an opponent in the middle lane to send them back to the start. First to bear off all seven wins.
ohs-rooms backend and is held for launch (no accounts, nothing to leak, until it's ready and counsel's clear). For now: you vs. the machine, on this device. Aspirational, marked aspirational.
The history
The Royal Game of Ur (the “Game of Twenty Squares”) was excavated from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s–30s; the boards sit in the British Museum. Its rules were lost for millennia until Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, reconstructed them from a Babylonian cuneiform tablet (c. 177 BCE). It is one of the oldest games humans still play — older than chess, older than backgammon, a race that outlived the empire that made it. Fitting for this house: people have been gathering to play, and to win and lose with grace, for forty-five centuries. Only humans score — and have, since Ur.
Brought to this table by a friend who still shows up with the good games. History per the British Museum / Irving Finkel; rules are the widely-played Finkel reconstruction.