Senet

Overview

The best-known board game of ancient Egypt, played from the Predynastic Period to at least the Late Period (664–332 BC), according to the Metropolitan Museum's essay on ancient board games.

It matters here for an uncomfortable reason: nobody knows how it was played. Every modern Senet ruleset is a reconstruction.

1. What actually survives

According to the Met:

• the board has three rows of ten squares, with the last five squares consistently decorated;
• pieces moved in an S-shaped (boustrophedon) path;
• throw sticks, not cubic dice, were the main way of deciding moves in Egypt;
• the name means "passing", and in the New Kingdom the game became linked with the journey to the afterlife. Scenes of Senet appear in chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead and on tomb walls.

The Met also holds a game box with Senet on one side and Twenty Squares on the other.

What does not survive is any Egyptian text explaining the rules. Modern versions are reconstructions from the boards, their markings, artwork and related games.

Treat what follows as a plausible game, not a historical one.

2. The board

Thirty squares in three rows of ten, played in a boustrophedon path — along the first row, back along the second, along the third.

The last five squares are decorated. Modern reconstructions give them, and square 15, special roles such as these, which are interpretations, not evidence:

Square	Common modern interpretation
15	House of Rebirth
26	House of Happiness — often compulsory to land on
27	House of Water — sends the piece back
28	House of Three Truths — exit on a throw of 3
29	House of Re-Atoum — exit on a throw of 2
30	Exit on a throw of 1

3. Equipment

Each player has five or seven pieces.

Moves come from four two-sided throw sticks, flat on one face and rounded on the other. In the usual reconstruction, the number of flat faces up gives the move:

Flat faces up	Move	Extra turn
1	1	Yes
2	2	No
3	3	No
4	4	Yes
0	5	Yes

4. Reconstructed play

Players alternate moving one piece along the path.

• You may not land on your own piece.
• Landing on a single enemy piece swaps the two pieces rather than capturing — a mechanic suggested by the board's layout.
• Two adjacent enemy pieces are protected and cannot be swapped.
• Three in a row form a blockade that cannot be passed.
• Pieces must exit from the final squares on exact throws.

First player to bear off all their pieces wins.

5. Why it is here

The honest answer to "what are the rules of Senet" is that we have lost them.

That is worth saying plainly, because a great many sources present the reconstruction as established fact.

Commonly argued

• The rules did not survive. Anyone presenting them as certain is overstating the evidence.
• Senet boards are older than the Royal Game of Ur's rule tablet by thousands of years, but Ur's tablet is the oldest known written rules for a board game.
• Throwing sticks, not dice. Cubic dice came much later.
• Landing on an enemy swaps rather than captures, in the standard reconstruction.