What is the oldest board game in the world?

It depends on what you count. Senet, from ancient Egypt, is often called the oldest known board game: possible boards turn up in burials from around 3100 BC. But nobody ever wrote its rules down, so we can only guess how it was played. The Royal Game of Ur, from Mesopotamia around 2500 BC, has a different claim to fame: it is the oldest board game we can actually play today, because its rules survived on a clay tablet.

Senet was a game of kings and queens. Its board had 30 squares in three rows of ten, and each player had five pawns. Queen Nefertari is painted playing it on her tomb wall, Tutankhamun was buried with it, and in the Book of the Dead the deceased plays senet against an invisible opponent.

The Game of Ur owes its revival to a patient museum curator. In the early 1980s Irving Finkel of the British Museum translated a Babylonian tablet written around 177 BC that described how to play. It turned out to be a race: two players roll pyramid-shaped dice and try to get all seven of their pieces around the course and off the board first, mixing luck and strategy much like backgammon. The tablet even tells fortunes, promising things like "You will draw fine beer" to players who land on certain squares.

And the oldest game boards of all are even older: archaeologists have reported dozens of Neolithic boards from around 7000 BC.