What is Royal Game of Ur with five pieces?
In this variant each player races five pieces instead of seven. Everything else follows the standard game: four binary dice give a throw of 0 to 4, pieces enter at the start of your own lane, run along the shared middle row and turn back into your side of the small block, landing on a rosette earns another throw, and the middle rosette is safe from capture. The first player to bear off all five pieces wins.
With two fewer pieces the game is shorter, and each piece matters more. A capture sends back a larger share of your army, and there are fewer spare pieces waiting off the board to use an awkward throw, so you are more often forced to make a move you would rather not. Holding the middle rosette with one piece while the others run past is still the backbone of the strategy.
Rule changes
| Rule | Standard Royal Game of Ur | Royal Game of Ur with five pieces |
|---|---|---|
| Pieces | Standard Royal Game of UrSeven pieces for each player, all off the board at the start. | Royal Game of Ur with five piecesFive pieces for each player, all off the board at the start. |
| How to win | Standard Royal Game of UrBe the first to bear off all seven pieces. | Royal Game of Ur with five piecesBe the first to bear off all five pieces. |
| Game length | Standard Royal Game of UrEach piece needs 15 steps to finish, 105 steps in all, plus everything lost to captures. | Royal Game of Ur with five pieces75 steps in all, about five sevenths of the standard race. |
| Dice, route and rosettes | Standard Royal Game of UrFour binary dice, the 14-square route, an extra throw on every rosette and a safe middle rosette. | Royal Game of Ur with five piecesThe same. |
| Other options | Standard Royal Game of UrEvery option in the table setup can be used. | Royal Game of Ur with five piecesFive pieces work with the Masters route and with Bell's rules. |
History
The boards that gave the game its name were excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur in the 1920s and date to around 2600–2400 BC. According to Irving Finkel of the British Museum, each player in these early sets had seven identical pieces, and the standard game uses seven.
Five pieces come from a much later source. On a clay tablet dated 177–176 BC, the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu copied rules for the Game of Twenty Squares, the later form of the same board, from a tablet that had belonged to a scholar called Iddin-Bēl. The tablet was dug up in the ruins of Babylon around 1880 and is now BM 33333B in the British Museum. It names five pieces for each player after birds: the Storm-bird, the Raven, the Rooster, the Eagle and the Swallow. In his study of the tablet, published in Ancient Board Games in Perspective in 2007, Finkel notes that these five pieces differed in form and in value, unlike the seven identical pieces from Ur. He also links them to a 14th-century BC gift list from the Mitanni king Tushratta to Egypt that includes five golden dogs and five silver dogs, most likely a set of pieces for the game.
This variant keeps the standard rules and simply plays with five identical pieces; the different powers of the tablet's bird pieces are not reproduced.