Whether you’re a fan of Snakes and  Ladders or more of a checkers connoisseur, some of your favorite board games are probably  centuries older than you might realize.

And while we know exactly how to play the  most modern versions of plenty of games, there are some board games that are so old that  we’ve lost all records of how to play them. Now, researchers are trying to get them back.

While not all of the world’s oldest games  would have had standardized rule sets, archeologists have figured out how people  played some of these ancient games. And they’re willing to roll the dice and  speculate about the rules of a few others. So, here are six of the world’s oldest board  games, and how we relearned to play them. [♪ INTRO] Our first game, Patolli, comes from Mesoamerica.

Patolli was played on soft, flexible mats. And that made the game very portable,   but also means that none of the  original boards survive today. While we aren’t 100% sure of its age, we do know   that Patolli predates Christopher  Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

Some evidence even suggests it  was played as long ago as 250 CE   in the central Mexican city state of Teotihuacán. It’s thought to have been associated with betting   and drinking, and often drew  large crowds of spectators. Europeans witnessed Mayans playing Patolli in the  1500s and described the game in their journals.

Then the game rapidly declined in  popularity, probably because … colonization. From those journals we know that the most  common board shape was a large cross. Using beans as casting dice,   players advanced their pieces along the  arms of the cross, racing along the board.

Marked squares along the board might  have corresponded to penalties. Despite the journal entries, a complete  set of rules was never recorded. But since Patolli was played by so  many different Mesoamerican groups,   it’s almost certain the rules evolved  over the centuries, and that cities had   their own preferred variations of  board configuration and gameplay.

It’s not uncommon for games to evolve like that. Just look at our next one … Polis. The earliest known reference to this Ancient Greek  game was made by an Athenian poet around 440 BCE.

But our best source for the rules comes from a  scholar who mentioned the game 600 years later. A Polis board was divided into squares  and there were two colors of game pieces,   one color for each player. Pieces could move forward,  backward, and right or left.

The goal of the game was to capture the opponent’s   pieces by trapping them between  two pieces of your own color. Sadly, only one Polis board exists  in the archaeological record. But there’s a silver lining, because it seems to   have evolved directly into another game  we have more information on: Latrunculi.

Latrunculi has been around since at least 100  BCE, based on an account of a Roman senator   playing a few rounds that were so high-stakes  that they made it into the history books. And some of our best records of the rules of  the game come from an unlikely source: Poetry. The poet Ovid and another anonymous  writer both described Latrunculi,   albeit in a fairly lyrical fashion.

Each described skillful  acts of capture and evasion,   but never came right out and described the  actual game play or board configurations. Typical poets! This has left scholars to deduce the mechanics and   starting positions based on what  the poets did and didn’t say.

For example, Ovid wrote that  pieces can move in straight lines,   either forward or backward,  and presumably sideways. And because the poets never described the starting  placement of the pieces, scholars have interpreted   this to mean that selecting starting points for  your pieces was part of the strategy of the game. But for the remainder of the rules, researchers  have turned to an unexpected ally: AI.

They developed a few plausible rulesets,   then set AI players against each other  to test each version of the game. Based on the progression of these  simulated games, researchers isolated   ruleset variations that provided consistent  and fun gameplay, and here’s what they found. We think that a game of Latrunculi starts with   players alternately placing  pieces on an empty board.

Once all the pieces were placed, players  would take turns moving their pieces with   the goal of capturing their opponent’s pieces by  trapping them between two of their own pieces. You could also jump over another  player’s pieces, like in Checkers. Latrunculi didn’t survive  the fall of the Roman Empire,   but it did probably evolve into an equally  mysterious Celtic game called Fidchell.

The Ancient Celts played this games for centuries,   probably having learned it when the  Romans invaded Celtic territories. It fell out of popularity in the  British Isles around 1000 CE,   and, like Latrunculi, its rules were lost to time. But Latrunculi isn’t the oldest  game with jumping game pieces.

That particular move may have come from Egypt. Around 1400 BCE, someone started to engrave a   grid of squares with diagonal lines  into the roof of an Egyptian temple. But it looks like they gave  up before they finished it,   possibly because they messed up the line spacing.

Which, relatable. But archaeologists think this was  more than just a cool pattern,   and that these diagonal lines may be  the board for a game called Alquerque. Alquerque was first mentioned by name  in the writings of a 10th century Arab   scholar slash poet, more than 2000 years after  that Egyptian engraver messed up his game board.

This description of the game indicates  it was brought to Spain by the Moors. Later, in the 13th century, its  rules were outlined more extensively. They describe a 5x5 board of squares with  alternating diagonals crossing the board.

Game pieces were placed at the intersections  of lines, and players could move their pieces   one space at a time or jump over the  opponent’s pieces to capture them. And if these rules sound kind of familiar,   it might be because some researchers think  Alquerque is a precursor to modern checkers. But that ancient carving and the  10th century description suggest   that it might’ve been played for 2,000  years before it was brought to Spain.

And it turns out that the people in Northern  Africa were pretty creative when it came to   gaming, because this isn’t even  the oldest game from the region. But before we play our next  game, here’s a quick ad break. This SciShow video is supported by Brilliant: an online learning platform that  helps you build real knowledge   through lessons you’ll actually remember.

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To try Brilliant for free, you can visit  brilliant.org/scishow or scan the   QR code onscreen—or you can click  on the link in the description. You’ll also get 20% off an  annual premium subscription. Hounds and Jackals originated in Ancient Egypt  and then spread throughout the known world.

Board fragments have been discovered all  across Northern Africa and the Middle East,   in places like Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The boards came in many different styles,  but some historical examples were shaped   like a standing animal with an  array of holes along its back. Animal-headed pegs were placed into  the holes to serve as game pieces,   and some of the boards even had little drawers  where you could keep the pegs between games.

Modern game designers: take note! A couple of Egyptian tomb  murals and a few drawings   on papyrus seem to reference Hounds and Jackals. But there are no written records of rules,  and the murals don’t include any text.

Gaming experts think that players would have moved   their pegs down the center of the  board on separate, parallel tracks. And the connections between the tracks probably  indicate some type of conflict between pieces. Alternatively, these linked  sets of holes could have been   shortcuts or penalties, like in Snakes & Ladders.

And certain decorated holes likely  indicated progress, or special bonuses,   and we’re pretty sure that the largest hole  at the end of the track was the finish line. Although these boards have not  been discovered with dice nearby,   all the context suggests that this  was a chance-based racing game. No word yet on whether the winner  is the hound or the jackal, though.

Around the same time that Hounds  and Jackals was popular in Egypt,   another race game was sweeping Mesopotamia. Boards for The Royal Game of Ur, also called Game  of Twenty Squares, have been found across modern   Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Cyprus, and Crete,  and the oldest one dates back to around 2500 BCE. And the Royal Game of Ur is extra special  because along with the boards themselves,   researchers have found the rule book, too.

In the 1980s, a researcher was translating  more than 100,000 tablets of cuneiform   writing and came across what appeared to  be a rule book, or rule tablet, I guess. This tablet was from the late  Babylonian period, around 200 BCE,   and the translator tried applying the ruleset  to every ancient board that had been discovered. He eventually realized the rules perfectly  matched boards of the Royal Game of Ur.

The tablet specified that players would have   cast dice or sticks and then raced to  move their pieces along the board. If you landed on an opponent’s piece,  they would have to go back to the start. And certain spaces were decorated  to indicate special advantages,   like safety from being bumped  back or getting to roll again.

The first player to move all seven  of their pieces across the board won! This game was clearly very popular based on  all of the places we’ve found the boards. And it turns out that some players  were into more than one game, too.

Archaeologists have discovered several examples  of double-sided boards scattered across Egypt,   with the Royal Game of Ur on one side,  and our last and oldest game on the other. Senet is the oldest known board game in the world. Fragments of boards and game pieces  dating back to at least 3000 BCE   have been discovered in ancient Egyptian tombs.

Which makes sense. If you’re packing for your eternal afterlife,  you’re going to want something to pass the time. Senet was such an important part of  Egyptian culture that by around 2600 BCE,   game boards were explicitly  listed as funerary components.

The game seems to have been  religiously significant,   and may have come to symbolize a  soul’s journey through the afterlife. Archaeologists have found murals in  tombs depicting men playing Senet,   some with captions describing  aspects of the gameplay. They’ve also discovered religious  texts that describe the game.

But even with all these clues, we still don’t know  exactly how the ancient Egyptians played Senet. Rules have been inferred from  these murals and snippets of text,   as well as from the symbols that  decorate the 30-square board. We think Senet was played by  racing the pieces along the board.

You’d determine how your pieces move by throwing  casting sticks, which are like dice, but… sticks. And players probably could have used blocking  strategies like you’d use in modern backgammon. However it was played, it must have been fun,   because Senet maintained its popularity  throughout Egypt for at least 2000 years.

Reconstructing the rules to these  classic games has been a massive   collaboration between archaeologists, game  scholars, and even citizen scientists. There’s an online database with digitized versions   of ancient games where you can play  using dozens of other proposed rules! Game enthusiasts maintain the  database and regularly propose   new rules that seem to make  sense based on what we know.

There’s so much for archaeologists  and anthropologists to learn about   ancient people based on their games. Broader trends, like shifts from  chance-based games to strategic,   skill-based games, might reflect  shifts in cultural priorities. It all makes you wonder what scholars will   think when they find copies of our  games thousands of years from now.

Whether it’s Settlers of Catan or Trivial  Pursuit, I hope they think we have good taste. [♪ OUTRO]