[wood_spirit]

Another ancient board game to be decoded is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur. This is from 2600BC so is older to Christ than Christ is to us.

The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!

[ChocMontePy]

There's an online version to play that I find surprisingly addictive:

https://royalur.net/

[tokai]

Thank you. I had never played it, surprisingly fun. Much like Ludo but actually better.

[dyauspitr]

> A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.

This is much more palatable and cool since they’re not just randomly guessing what the game can be like this article is

[Shorel]

They are not randomly guessing, they are doing something more sofisticated: they are correlating gameplay with the evidence of board wear.

They are creating a probability distribution function where each point is a different gameplay ruleset and then we are free to pick the gameplay ruleset with the highest probability, with the caveat that there are other similar gameplays, with slightly different rules, and almost the same probability. And there are other gameplay rules with much lower probability because they don't match the wear of the board.

A random guess would have a flat distribution where any gameplay has the same probability.

[vintermann]

It's far from random. Reconstructing it with game playing AIs is a bit excessive maybe, but blocking games (hare games) are a style of game which are very widely historically attested.

[timbit42]

You mean Irving Finkel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Finkel