
Rediscovering rules for ancient board games - elorant
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz483y/scientists-are-discovering-long-lost-rules-for-ancient-board-games
======
drdeadringer
> the oldest known board game is an Egyptian game that dates back to 3100 BCE
> called Senet. “We almost never have the rules for these early games,” Browne
> said. “The rules have never been recorded, so our knowledge is largely based
> on historian’s reconstructions.”

I live near the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, CA. The group behind
it owns the whole square city block, so besides the museum itself there's also
a research library, other related buildings, and a nice park area all around.

Included in the park space is a reconstruction of the Senet game, along with
an approximate reconstruction of the rules; it's explained that the rules are
an approximation with a rough reason as to why.

Whether the rules were simply "lost to time" or due to a subset of this as
"they were never written down because everyone knew them" I'm not sure, but it
was nice to see the game available in person.

------
sndwnm
As more powerful AI computation capabilities become available to hobbyists, I
hope someone takes up researching new board games similar to Go, Chess and the
other giants of abstract strategy games (ASG).

Basically, train really strong AI players using the AlphaZero method with the
rules of the game changed by a human author (either some variant of Go, or a
completely new game). Then take a look at the games the AI plays at its
strongest level and let people decide if the game looks interesting enough for
them to try play competitively. With the strong AI player already in place,
human players would have something to learn from and a serious competitive
culture could be born.

In the absence of something like this, I don't think it's surprising the only
popular ASGs are very, very old. Modern commercial board games are fine, but
they supply a different demand than ASGs.

~~~
kd5bjo
You’re unlikely to see another game very similar to Chess or Go, because they
have each evolved over time to be the pinnacle of their particular niche, and
there’s really only room for one king of each of these hills. There are newer
games that are starting to show similar signs of longevity, though: Scrabble,
Poker, and Bridge come to mind.

Modern commercial board games and some genres of video game have communities
that could continue for a similar length of time, but they’re still too young
to have reached a consensus on one or two games; I suspect that’s a few
decades out. The good news is that there are some older titles that are still
holding their own in the market— to beat out the newcomers hints that there’s
some kind of staying power there.

~~~
disordered
I don't agree with your premise that chess has evolved to be at the pinnacle
of its niche (I don't know enough about Go to comment on it). There are a
number of interesting variations in chess-like games that, while maintaining
the general theme of killing the enemy king, offer aspects of gameplay that
chess does not.

Two of the more well known variations are shōgi and xiangqi: Shōgi allows the
redeployment of captured pieces, whilst xiangqi limits the movement of a few
pieces and has a mechanism for representing artillery. I find that each game
has a very different character to that of western chess, even despite the fact
that they share a large number of tactical motifs.

Western chess may be the most popular variant world-wide, but that's no
indication that it is at any kind of pinnacle.

~~~
michaelscott
I think it's fair to call it the pinnacle when talking about the Western
world. Both shogi and xiangqi developed from the same base game as chess
historically, so I'm not sure how far they venture from the theme compared to
something like hnefatafl (which is chess-like but varies considerably in game
mechanics when compared with shogi and xiangqi).

~~~
kd5bjo
Just like Like Go and Poker each have a number of variant rule sets in common
use, I mentally group all of these as “chess” based on their common ancestry.
I haven’t really studied them enough to know if this is truly justified.

------
reificator
I've been wondering, how closely could a future/alien civilization recreate
Magic the Gathering's rules given nothing but a collection that included every
card and several (100? 1000?) valid decks for different formats.

I imagine they could get fairly close, especially thanks to reminder text. But
I wonder how older/erattaed cards or old templating might hinder those
efforts.

For those unfamiliar with Magic, the comprehensive rules are about 190 pages
of 10-20 rules each, plus a glossary/index. On top of that, the golden rule of
Magic is that if a card and the rules disagree, the card takes precedence. And
there are over 20,000 unique named cards, though a small number are
functionally the same card as another with a different name.

See this link for the comprehensive rules, but note that the vast, vast
majority of games don't require an exhaustive understanding. You can learn
enough to play in 10 minutes, though you'll probably need to learn something
new each game for a little while.

[https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-
fo...](https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-
formats/rules)

~~~
Someone
I don’t know the game, but skimming
[https://media.wizards.com/2019/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...](https://media.wizards.com/2019/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020190823.pdf)
(not the best organized of texts, IMO. ‘Normal’ game rules start describing
the goal of the game
([https://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=171&view=article](https://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=171&view=article):

 _”1.1 The game of chess is played between two opponents who move their pieces
on a square board called a ‘chessboard’. The player with the light-coloured
pieces (White) makes the first move, then the players move alternately, with
the player with the dark-coloured pieces (Black) making the next move. A
player is said to ‘have the move’ when his opponent’s move has been ‘made’.”_

Similarly, the rules for bridge ([http://www.worldbridge.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/2017La...](http://www.worldbridge.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/2017LawsofDuplicateBridge-paginated.docx)) start

 _”Duplicate Bridge is played with a pack of 52 cards, consisting of 13 cards
in each of four suits. The suits rank downward in the order spades (), hearts
(), diamonds (), clubs (). The Cards of each suit rank downward in the order
Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2”_

As another example, couldn’t those “in a Emperor/Commander/multiplayer game,…”
sections be grouped by type of game?), there are decks, stacks, sideboards,
zones, one of which is the battlefields, and libraries. Presumably, they all
behave differently.

If those aliens don’t know what these words mean in this world, are they going
to figure out what they mean in the game from reading the cards? For example,
rule 405.2 _”The stack keeps track of the order that spells and /or abilities
were added to it. Each time an object is put on the stack, it’s put on top of
all objects already there.”_ isn’t hard to infer if you know what a stack is,
but if you don’t?

Similarly, I read _”An effect may state that a player wins the game.”_.
Chances are those aliens will think that’s the only way to win.

Also, that text is full of extremely weird rules (“A card’s name is always
considered to be the English version of its name, regardless of printed
language”) that, I guess, are impossible to discover from the cards only.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Similarly, I read _" An effect may state that a player wins the game."_.
> Chances are those aliens will think that’s the only way to win.

This is vanishingly unlikely, because of the lich-flavored cards that
explicitly state "You don't lose the game for having 0 or less life."

See e.g.
[https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=46134)
.

> Also, that text is full of extremely weird rules ("A card’s name is always
> considered to be the English version of its name, regardless of printed
> language") that, I guess, are impossible to discover from the cards only.

Again, with access to every card, it's pretty well guaranteed that this rule
would be noticed. The only reason this rule exists in the first place is
because of different cards sharing the same name in non-English languages. I
don't know how to look up the foreign names of cards, but there's one pair in
particular that I imagine is a real offender here:

Roc Egg:
[https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=470619)

and Rukh Egg:
[https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=965)

~~~
lmkg
> The only reason this rule exists in the first place is because of different
> cards sharing the same name in non-English languages.

I'm sure that's not the only reason. Some cards cards explicitly reference
each other by name (rare, but it happens). More significantly, imagine you
created a deck using both English and French versions of the same card! That
would break several rules, including "name a card" effects. More
significantly, the uniqueness restriction on Legendary creatures is
technically defined by name.

~~~
thaumasiotes
That's a fair point, but it isn't the reason for the rule.

It's just assumed, by everyone, that it doesn't matter if you refer to playing
pieces using a foreign language. They're still the same pieces. I don't think
there's a lot of confusion, if you're playing chess in France, whether you're
permitted to promote your pawn into a bishop or only a fou. As long as you
pick the tall piece that moves diagonally, you're fine.

------
ArtWomb
Ludii was presented at 2019 IEEE Conference on Games this past week in London.
Lot's more interesting stuff in the rest of the conference program ;)

[http://ieee-cog.org/assets/program-full.pdf](http://ieee-
cog.org/assets/program-full.pdf)

------
huehehue
I spent a couple of months last year researching Liubo and constructing/play-
testing a crude recreation. Of course, we don't even know what a full game set
looks like, much less how it was played. But the result was a decent game, and
I like to think there's enough overlap between board game enthusiasts and
history nerds that someone could crank a few of these out on Kickstarter.

