First board game with surviving rules

The oldest board game whose rules are known is the Royal Game of Ur, which was popular in ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) from around 2600 BCE. During the 1980s, British Museum curator Irving Finkel was able to reconstruct the rules from two incomplete descriptions written on clay tablets by Mesopotamian scribes.

The rules describe a type of board game known as a "race game", similar to backgammon. Each player's pieces are moved along a path, progressing according to the roll of a set of tetrahedral dice. The players each have seven pieces, and the winner is the first to get all of them around the board. The game uses a mixture of luck and strategy, and the number of pieces the players choose to have on the board at any one time have a significant effect on how the game is played.

The sources for the reconstructed rules are a tablet written by Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu in 177 BCE, as well as another written a few centuries earlier by a scribe called Iddin-Bēl. The earlier Egyptian game of Senet was likely similar in its gameplay, but the rules can only be guessed at from surviving boards.