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It's a curiosity,. But you should probably rather be playing backgammon.
Looks a bit like Mancala. I don't know much about Senet, but we played Mancala all the time, when I was a kid (in Africa).
I grew up on a small island in the Pacific and played something similar[1] called chongka' as a kid as well.
I once won an AI tournament for senet :) so for me this post relates to AI... But still... it's a mystery how this gets to the top of HN
So when chess was first played, this game was already ancient. That is pretty cool.
There are 3 ancient games still played commonly: chess, backgammon, and go.
I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.
I remember getting the game as part of a collectors edition of the show LOST. Used to play it quite a bit.
I was always under the impression that a form of backgammon was on the ancient Mesopotamian/Sumerian scene around the same time -- though, now that I actually come to look for a good source to support that notion, I'm struggling to find one.
Wikipedia and other sources just say "backgammon can be traced back nearly 5000 years" [0]
> Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied over time and from place to place. The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game. If eve…
So, it's not entirely black and white. Historians are pretty sure about some of the rules, but it's possible there were other rules we don't know. The rules played today are a balance between historical accuracy, and just trying the different theories and playing the one that seems the most fun.
That might seem like just making things up, but that's what the quote is referring to. It's hard to say what set of rules was the most common, but there is some reason to believe that the current set of rules is as least similar, and might have been played due to the way that these games didn't have 1 concrete set of rules. "House rules" meant that there was often many different sets of rules in place. Think how checkers has sets of rules that allow for non-forced jumps, flying kings, etc. Maybe your can't tell whether your set of rules was the most common set, but if your rules are based on evidence, it's likely that it was played similar to that somewhere.
> Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied over time and from place to place. The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game. If eve…
The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little, but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough change to be a different game. With Senet, we d…
I once won an AI tournament for senet :) so for me this post relates to AI... But still... it's a mystery how this gets to the top of HN
Random wiki pages are one of the things that give HN its pleasant Old Internet atmosphere to me. Sometimes I've thought about sampling over wikipedia uniformly at random, submitting to HN, and observing the trends in what rises to the top.