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About Ur
The Royal Game of Ur, also known as Twenty Squares, has a history that stretches over five millennia! Its earliest boards date back to 2500 BCE and examples have been found across the Mediterranean. This game is a 3D computer gameplay experience that takes you into the ancient world. The game board, pieces, and dice are 3D reconstructions of actual ancient examples from museums. This historical game is harder than it looks!
This is a race game: speed is of the essence! It brings to a board game the ultimate skill for the merchants, traders, bandits and pirates who drove their fleets and caravans around the ancient world. The goal is to get your counters from start to finish around the board, before your opponent does.
Prove your strategic skill! How will you play out your strategies: do you want to put all of your pieces on the board at once, or focus on moving a single piece along? With a good throw of the dice, would you rather move your own counter ahead, or take one of your competitor’s off the board? Watch out, this game was used for ancient divination: you may see a glimpse of your future as you play!
Game Features:
Project Team:
This is a race game: speed is of the essence! It brings to a board game the ultimate skill for the merchants, traders, bandits and pirates who drove their fleets and caravans around the ancient world. The goal is to get your counters from start to finish around the board, before your opponent does.
Prove your strategic skill! How will you play out your strategies: do you want to put all of your pieces on the board at once, or focus on moving a single piece along? With a good throw of the dice, would you rather move your own counter ahead, or take one of your competitor’s off the board? Watch out, this game was used for ancient divination: you may see a glimpse of your future as you play!
Game Features:
- Desktop or Laptop gameplay via keyboard.
- Roll virtual dice on each turn and move your pieces around the board.
- Land on a rosette for an extra turn or land on an AI opponent's piece to trap it.
- Three different levels of gameplay difficulty through different AI opponents.
- Three different avatars for gameplay.
- Built in tutorial.
- Track your high scores in game.
- Control your resolution and background music.
- Educational! Learn about the Royal Game of Ur, a real historical game played around the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Read ancient phrases between players as you play.
- Free! Use for classes.
Project Team:
- Kylie Gilde - Lead Programmer, Freelance Programmer
- Dr. Sandra Blakely – Project Director, Emory University, Department of Classics
- Dr. Joanna C. Mundy – Project Manager, Digital Projects Specialist, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
- Kevin Dressel - Technical Architect, Shiny Dolphin Games LLC
- Dr. Joy Li – Game Development Collaborator, Kennesaw State University, Assistant Professor of Computer Game Design and Development
- Craig Brasco – Visual Interface Collaborator and Illustrator, Kennesaw State University, Assistant Professor of Art | Graphic Communications
- Evie Wang Edmundson - Freelance Composer and Producer
- David Herrod - Student Game Design and Programmer, Kennesaw State University (2020)
- Josh Winston - Trailer, Digital Scholarship Associate, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Wow, the Royal Game of Ur as a digital game!... It's a great game to play in your local medieval pub, with friends, lots of beer and mead, the music group playing old instruments, breaks into playing Game of Thrones main theme... true story, caught us all off guard... Great times, but I digress. Unfortunately, the rules used here in this digital version are horrible. For example: in this version it's possible to have the pawns from both players crossing the middle bridge in different directions...!? WTF dev?! This is the oldest board game in the world, played 4'500 years ago in the middle east, in public, in taverns, drinking lots of alcohol, so... How the hell would drunkards (like us) be able to track which pawns were traveling left-to-right or right-to-left in the bridge section, where can be several pawns from both players fighting there??? How do you track moving directions!? That is a ridiculous idea! Get serious, the bridge is a one way path! To those interested in the most accurate rules to date, check the YouTube video "Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur." -- Cheers! ^^2 found this helpful
Dice roll generation needs fixing, game feels like the dice rolls keep two single pieces in constant flow of a never ending game1 found this helpful
It's fun!
Just like how I remembered it.
Intense
May your copper be priced as lead! It is amazing to be able to play the Royal Game of Ur on steam, in the year 2025, nearly 5000 years after the game was invented. Playing as and against historical/literary figures, with information given on who they were, and they insult each other with real insults from Mesopotamia, what more could you want in a FREE board game!
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