Board Games
The great board games of the ancient world, with English built in: every move written out in a sentence, and hints and take-backs earned with English questions. Chess with six ancient armies and Chinese chess, the Viking and Irish king’s table, senet and mehen from Egypt, the Royal Game of Ur, and the Greek and Roman games of capture.
← Back to Language GamesChess of the Ancient World
Chess with a Hellenistic army: the basileus and basilissa, triremes, war elephants, cavalry and hoplites. Play modern chess or shatranj, the old Persian and Arab rules, where the queen was a vizier and the bishop an elephant. Every move is written out in English.
Play →Chess: the full edition
All six armies: Greek, Egyptian, Persian (with the real shatranj names), Indian (chaturanga), Norse (the Lewis chessmen) and the standard pieces.
Play →The King’s Table
The board games of the Vikings and the Irish: a king and his defenders in the middle, a larger army of attackers all round. Can the king escape to a corner before he is surrounded? Hnefatafl (11 × 11) and brandubh, the “black raven” (7 × 7).
Play →Senet
The game of passing, played in Egypt for over two thousand years and buried with Tutankhamun. Throw the sticks and race your cones or spools through thirty squares, past the House of Water, to the afterlife.
Play →The Royal Game of Ur
The 4,500-year-old race game from the royal tombs of Ur, whose rules were read from a Babylonian clay tablet. Throw the pyramid dice, land on the rosettes to throw again, and knock your opponent’s pieces back to the start.
Play →Petteia & Latrunculi
The game Plato knew and the game of the Roman legions: trap your opponent’s stones between two of yours. Petteia on an 8 × 8 board, or ludus latrunculorum on 8 × 12, where you must block in the enemy general.
Play →Xiangqi
Chinese chess, played for over a thousand years: chariots, cannons that jump to capture, elephants that cannot cross the river, and two generals who must never meet face to face. The full rules, with every move in English.
Play →Mehen
One of the oldest board games in the world: race your marbles along the coils of a snake to its head, and wake your lion to hunt the other players’ marbles. A reconstruction, because no rules survive.
Play →Every game can be played on one screen, against the computer, or with each player moving from their own phone.