The Loyal Spies Of Ur

The Loyal Spies of Ur is my interactive version of the game The Royal Game of Ur, dated to around ~2500 BCE.

My reconstruction of the rules is based on the boards found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur and on tablet BM.33333.B (c. 2nd century BCE). The movement paths follow J. Masters’ interpretation, as it is the only one that makes use of all the squares for both sides, gives greater coherence to the special squares, and avoids ambiguities regarding the direction of the pieces. According to the tablet, this also makes sense, since it describes four types of terrain: the safe zone, the pursuit zone, safe zones within the pursuit, and a final stretch where the pieces confront each other. Although the discovered boards had three icosahedra (which suggests that rolling zero three times may have been equivalent to a four), I have taken the liberty of using four dice; the reason is that, given the game’s espionage theme, it makes little sense for scoring no points to be equivalent to scoring the maximum, and at the same time it allows for the possibility of absolute failures, which makes the game more exciting.

The game is offered as-is, licensed under GPLv3, compiled for GNU/Linux and Windows, and includes the original Godot 4 project in case you want to study it. References to the creators of the sounds (all under the Creative Commons Zero license) are included in the names of their respective files within the project.