The Oldest Board Games We Know About
A look at the handful of games whose boards have survived for thousands of years.
When archaeologists find a board game that's thousands of years old, they usually don't find a rulebook alongside it. Boards, dice, and playing pieces survive; the instructions for actually playing almost never do. That gap is why the history of the oldest board games is really a history of educated guesswork, pieced together from carved boards, worn game pieces, and the occasional lucky written reference from a much later period.
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the strongest candidates for the oldest board game with a board that still exists. A set was excavated from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, dating to around 2600 BCE — making it roughly 4,600 years old. For most of the time since its discovery in the 1920s, nobody knew how it was played, since no rules survived alongside the board itself. Remarkably, a clay tablet from around 177 BCE, more than two thousand years after the game was first played, was later found describing its rules in enough detail that researchers were able to reconstruct a playable version, revealing a race game that used dice-like pyramidal pieces to move tokens along a track shaped roughly like two connected rectangles.
Senet, from ancient Egypt, may be even older, with boards appearing in tomb paintings and burial goods dating back to around 3100 BCE. Senet boards were sometimes buried alongside the dead, suggesting the game had taken on a symbolic meaning connected to the journey through the afterlife, beyond being simply a way to pass time. As with the Royal Game of Ur, no complete ancient rulebook for senet survives, and modern versions people play today are reconstructions based on board markings and later Egyptian texts that reference the game without fully explaining it.
Backgammon's ancestors reach back nearly as far. Boards resembling a race game played with dice have been found in the same general region and period as the Royal Game of Ur, and some historians consider backgammon a distant descendant of these very early Mesopotamian race games, even though the specific rules used today didn't stabilize until much more recently, including the doubling cube, which is a 20th-century addition.
Go, still played competitively today with essentially unchanged rules, is frequently cited as the oldest board game still played in close to its original form, with references in Chinese historical texts placing its existence at least 2,500 years ago, and some traditions claiming a considerably older origin still debated by historians. Unlike the Royal Game of Ur or senet, go never fell out of use long enough to require modern reconstruction — it has a continuous, documented tradition of play, particularly in China, Korea, and Japan, stretching back many centuries.
What all of these games share, beyond their age, is a use of extremely simple physical components — a marked surface, a small number of pieces, and sometimes a die or a set of sticks — to create decisions with real depth. That simplicity is very possibly why they lasted long enough for us to find them at all: a complicated game with fragile components needs to be carefully preserved to survive a few centuries, but a board scratched into stone, or a race track drawn with a handful of lines, can outlast the civilization that invented it by thousands of years, waiting to be dug up long after everyone who knew how to play it is gone.