Review on Senet
by
Edmund Phoon Jian Cheng
Board
games have been with us for many years, teaching us to apply ways to strategise
our actions when competing with one another to “race to the end” and win the
game. The origin of these games dates way back thousands of years ago in Egypt,
where some of the oldest known board games have existed. The most commonly
known of these is Senet, with images of the game discovered in the First
Dynasty and Predynastic tombs around 3100 BC. The board has three rows, each
with ten squares, with some of the last ones detailed and used for special
effects to the player’s tokens landing on these squares. It is assumed that the
first 14 squares are reserved for the starting points of the game, without
going beyond the 15th square that has what the ancient players call “The House of
Rebirth”. The tokens are placed in an alternate fashion based on each layer. Four
sticks are used to determine the pawns’ movement, with each flat of the stick
representing a move and all sticks faced down represent five moves instead of
zero.
How
Senet was played many years ago is uncertain to most people, as there were no
rules depicted in the tombs’ illustrations, making it difficult to interpret
the activity of the Egyptian game. However, our team have made a recreation of this
ancient entertainment and defined its own set of regulations, through the help
of several references to other versions of Senet throughout the course of thousands
of years to the present, as well as similar games such as Snakes and Ladders.
Our
custom gameplay may allow two teams of players, and it consists of coins of
different types, based on the player team, as the pawn tokens, and dice (using
the traditional numbers on each side to determine the number of moves for the
player) as replacement for the sticks for the printed board game of 30 squares on
paper. Players begin by moving their tokens from square 1 once their dice is
rolled, a common feature for most board games. We added in the rule for the
prohibition of communication during gameplay since indicating the player to
make his/her move counts as ‘cheating’. If a team is caught communicating, a
forfeit has to be made in the form of adding a token for the team to be placed
at the starting point. Instead of moving all pawns off the board game, we set
the game to win when the first four pawns reach the end and leave the game, to
ensure a quick gameplay as opposed to the much slower pace and looping of the
original.
Some
of the previous rules of the different versions of Senet are still implemented
in our game. For example, if the player’s pawn lands on a square already
occupied by the opposing team’s pawn, the latter gets sent to the square where
the player’s pawn originally stands. The special squares on the board game may still
have the same effects to the players’ pawn tokens. Only the effect for Square
29 (“The House of the Re-Atoum”) is modified slightly to enable the number of
moves from the dice to determine the token’s “race to the end”. If the player
has an even number, his/her token is allowed to leave the board, but if it is
an odd, the token gets pushed backwards by that number of moves. Initially, we
also suggested a ‘Scissors paper stone’ to determine a team’s turn as part of our game's conflict resolution but makes it
unfair for the opposing team who does not get their turn occasionally.
The
overall summary of our version of Senet is simple and fun as the other board
games to modern players. It is satisfying that the legacy of such an ancient
game like Senet can never go extinct as we dive deeper to learn and discover more
of it, while at the same time getting immersed into the experience thousands of years
ago.
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