Royal Game of Ur -- Nothing New Under The Sun

....and there is no new thing under the sun.....Thou art the LORD the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gavest him the name of Abraham;

Ecclesiastes 1:9/Nehemiah 9:7

There is nothing new under the sun---your ancestors thousands of years ago made board games to pass time -- just like today.

Q: Wonder if Abraham, while growing up in Ur in Mesopotamia, ever watched people play this game?

"The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player strategy race board game of the tables family that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. 

The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata, and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. One board, held by the British Museum, is dated to c. 2600 – c. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world.

At the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, and events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings. 

The Game of Ur remained popular until late antiquity.

It was eventually forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish

population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it called 'Asha' until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel.

The objective of the game is for a player to move all seven of their pieces along the course and off the board before their opponent. On all surviving gameboards, the two sides of the board are always identical with each other, suggesting that one side of the board belongs to one player and the opposite side to the other player. When a piece is on one of the player's own squares, it is safe from capture.
When it is on one of the eight squares in the middle of the board, the opponent's pieces may capture it by landing on the same space, sending the piece back off the board so that it must restart the course from the beginning. 

This means there are six "safe" squares and eight "combat" squares. There can never be more than one piece on a single square at any given time, so having too many pieces on the board at once can impede a player's mobility.
When a player rolls a number using the dice, they may choose to move any of their pieces on the board or add a new piece to the board if they still have pieces that have not entered the game.

All surviving gameboards have a colored rosette in the middle of the center row. According to Finkel's reconstruction, if a piece is located on the space with the rosette, it is safe from capture. Finkel also states that when a piece lands on any of the three rosettes, the player gets an extra roll." 

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