Long before chess, before backgammon, before anyone had thought to carve a checkerboard, Egyptians were sliding pawns across a grid of thirty squares. That game was Senet, and it is one of the oldest board games humanity has any record of — played for roughly 2,000 years, buried with kings, and painted on tomb walls as a stand-in for the soul's journey past death itself.
Here's the history, and then exactly how to play it at your own table.
A game older than the pyramids' polish
The earliest evidence of Senet comes from Egypt around 3100 BCE, in the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods — old enough that the game was already ancient when Tutankhamun was born. Hieroglyphic paintings show people bent over Senet boards as far back as the First Dynasty, and archaeologists have pulled boards from tombs across thousands of years of Egyptian history.
The most famous examples were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun (who died around 1323 BCE): several Senet sets, including a gorgeous ebony-and-ivory board resting on ornate legs. Kings did not get buried with junk. Senet mattered.
Over the centuries the game shifted from a pastime into something spiritual. By the New Kingdom, Senet had become a symbol of the dead person's passage through the Duat — the underworld — with each square standing in for a stage of that dangerous journey. A well-played game meant the gods favored you. Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead even depicts the deceased playing Senet against an unseen opponent, effectively gambling for their place in the afterlife. It was Solitaire, but the stakes were eternity.
What a Senet board looks like
A Senet board is simple and unmistakable once you know it: thirty squares arranged in three rows of ten. Play snakes through the grid in a backward-S (boustrophedon) path — left to right along the top row, right to left along the middle, then left to right again along the bottom — so the pawns travel the whole board in one continuous line.
A few squares near the end are marked with hieroglyphs and carry special meaning, which we'll get to. Each player has a set of pawns (commonly five per side, though ancient sets vary), and instead of dice, players used throwing sticks or knucklebones to determine movement.
An honest word about the rules
Here's the part most retellings skip, and we won't: no complete rulebook for Senet survives. The Egyptians left us beautiful boards and plenty of pictures of people playing, but never a full set of written instructions. Everything below is a reconstruction, pieced together in the 20th century by scholars — most notably Egyptologist Timothy Kendall and game historian R. C. Bell — from tomb paintings, surviving boards, and fragments of text.
It's a careful, well-reasoned reconstruction, and it plays beautifully. But if anyone tells you they know exactly how a scribe played Senet in 1400 BCE, they're guessing with more confidence than the evidence allows. We prefer to hand you a great, playable version and be straight about where it comes from.
How to play (the reconstructed rules)
Players: 2
Goal: Be the first to move all your pawns off the far end of the board.
Setup. Each player takes five pawns. Traditionally the pawns start alternating on the first row — one player's pawn, then the other's, and so on across the opening squares.
Rolling. Senet uses four two-sided throwing sticks (one side flat, one side rounded), or you can use four coins. Count how many land "flat side up":
- 1 flat side = move 1 (and roll again)
- 2 flat sides = move 2
- 3 flat sides = move 3
- 4 flat sides = move 4 (and roll again)
- 0 flat sides (all rounded up) = move 5 (and roll again)
Rolls of 1, 4, and 5 earn you another throw. Rolls of 2 and 3 pass play to your opponent.
Moving. Move one pawn forward along the S-shaped path by the number you rolled. You must move if a legal move exists.
Attacking. If your pawn lands on a square occupied by a single enemy pawn, the two swap places — you bump them backward. But a pawn is safe if it's protected: two of an opponent's pawns sitting side by side cannot be attacked, and three in a row form a blockade that nothing can pass.
The special squares (the last stretch). The final squares of the board carry hieroglyphs and their own rules in most reconstructions:
- Square 26 — the House of Happiness (nfr): a required stopping point; every pawn must land here before continuing.
- Square 27 — the House of Water: a hazard. A pawn that lands here (or can't clear it) is sent back to square 15, the House of Rebirth.
- Squares 28, 29, 30 — the final houses: these require exact rolls to bear off. Land precisely and your pawn escapes the board.
Winning. The first player to move all five pawns off the board wins — and, if you're feeling appropriately Egyptian about it, secures safe passage to the afterlife.
Why Senet still deserves a spot on your table
Senet is a rare thing: a game that is genuinely ancient and genuinely fun. The push-your-luck throwing sticks, the swaps and blockades, the tension of needing an exact roll at the finish — it hits the same pleasure centers as backgammon, which is no accident, since the two are cousins in the same family tree of race games.
Playing it is a small act of time travel. When you bump an opponent's pawn back into the House of Water, you're making the same move a bored temple scribe made three thousand years ago — and the same move painted on the wall of a queen's tomb so she'd have something to do for eternity.
At Ancient.Games we build our sets to honor games exactly like this one — the old ones, the ones with real history behind them. If Senet has you curious about the games our ancestors actually played, come see what's on the shelf.