What Are the World’s Oldest Board Games?

When you think about classic board games, what comes to mind? Some may think of 20th-century Parker Brothers games like Clue or Monopoly (a famous ripoff of The Landlord’s Game). Others may think of chess, a game dating back to the medieval period.

But the oldest board games stretch back even longer—some 5,000 years. In modern-day countries like Egypt, Iraq and Iran, archaeologists have discovered intricate game boards and carved playing tokens that ancient people once used to pass the time. 

One of the oldest known board games is Senet, which Egyptians may have begun playing as early as 3000 B.C. Senet boards had 30 squares that players had to pass over to win, including one “hazard” space. In lieu of dice, players threw casting sticks to determine how far they would move. Senet could have started as a recreational game, but over time it developed a religious significance—both as a symbolic journey through the underworld and a way of communing with the dead. 

During the Old Kingdom, a period between about 2700 and 2200 B.C., motifs in Egyptian tombs portrayed the dead playing Senet with the living. Peter Piccione, a history professor at the College of Charleston who has written extensively about Senet, speculates that this might be why archaeologists have found makeshift Senet boards carved into pavement near ancient tombs: so that visitors could “play with the spirit of the dead person as a means of communication,” he says.

The Egyptian board game Mehen held a religious connection, too. The game shared its name with an Egyptian snake god. The game board resembled a coiled serpent with its head at the center and its tail on the outer edge. Yet unlike Senet, Mehen did not remain popular for very long after the Old Kingdom. No surviving text explains how Mehen was played, so scholars are still unsure how ancient Egyptians played the coiled snake game.

Another popular ancient game was the Royal Game of Ur, also known as Twenty Squares. The former name comes from the discovery of game boards in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, a city-state in ancient Mesopotamia (in modern-day Iraq), dating between 2600 and 2400 B.C. Since then, archaeologists have discovered more than 100 versions of the game across the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, from Iran to Cyprus and Egypt.

We know how ancient people played the Royal Game of Ur thanks to a cuneiform tablet describing the rules. Two players started on opposite ends of the board and raced their pieces along a track to get to the other side. Every fourth square had a special symbol that seemed to mark it as a “lucky” space. Players determined how far they would move by casting dice made of bone.

Games are always evolving and changing, and it can sometimes be hard to tell when a board game is different enough to be considered a new game. At Shahr-i Sokhta, or the “Burnt City,” in Iran, archaeologists discovered a game board dating between 2600 and 2400 B.C. that is shaped similarly to the Royal Game of Ur, but with notable differences that suggest it may have been a distinct game. The Shahr-i Sokhta board does not contain “lucky” squares and each of the 20 playing spaces is encircled by the coils of a carved serpent that slithers around the board.

One of the longest-lasting board games is a Chinese game called weiqi, which English speakers may know as go. The strategy game is mentioned in the Analects of Confucius, a text compiled after the philosopher’s death in 479 B.C. Later, go spread to Japan, where it became associated with samurai. Today, people all over the world continue to play this game.

A game that didn’t last as long but was popular in its heyday is ludus latrunculorum. Latin for “the game of mercenaries,” ludus latrunculorum was widely played during the Roman Empire. In 2019, archaeologists discovered a cracked game board at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall, a fortification that the Emperor Hadrian ordered built in what is now northern England in the second century A.D.

By the seventh century, people in India were playing a board game called chaturanga, in which different game tokens had different roles and ways of moving. Scholars generally consider chaturanga an early form of chess, although the details of its evolution are unclear. Chess became popular among European monarchs in the Middle Ages and remains widely played today.