The first player to move all five of their pawns to the finish won. Squares 26 to 29 were decorated with symbols and seem to have held particular significance-perhaps a little like the "miss a turn" or "roll a six" square on some modern game boards. The pawns traveled right along the upper row, then left along the middle row, and right along the lower row to reach the finish square (number 30) in the bottom right corner of the board. Players threw an ancient equivalent of gaming dice to establish how many squares to move one of their pawns on a given turn. It seems to have risen to popularity in all tiers of Egyptian society about 5000 years ago-and was still being enjoyed by Egyptians 2500 years later.įrom snippets of ancient texts, Egyptologists suspect senet was played by two competitors, each with perhaps five pawns that were placed on a grid of 30 squares arranged in three rows of 10.
Senet probably wasn't the world's first board game, but it was one of the first to become a smash hit. Now, a version of the game sitting in a California museum might reveal when this dramatic transformation took place. The backgammonlike senet started out as a mere pastime, but over nearly 2 millennia it evolved into a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represented the underworld.
Ancient Egyptians took their board games seriously.
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