Too bad we don't know the rules. Also, I think it's one of the oldest board games including Go and Backgammon.
Senet
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: Senet
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get your point, but really is anything like this so black and white? What about "house-rules"? If I am playing Pinochle with several additional house-rules (that either add or subtract from the "official" Pinochle rules) then what am I playing? On one hand I could see the argument that I am technically no longer playing official Pinochle, but it seems wrong to say that I am playing a game that is completely distinc…
You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing p…
If you fling a chess set out into space, once it is disconnected from it's environment, does it enter a macroscopic superposition of states and start playing itself?
Re: Senet
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get your point, but really is anything like this so black and white? What about "house-rules"? If I am playing Pinochle with several additional house-rules (that either add or subtract from the "official" Pinochle rules) then what am I playing? On one hand I could see the argument that I am technically no longer playing official Pinochle, but it seems wrong to say that I am playing a game that is completely distinc…
You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing p…
It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern chess was at one time considered just a variant of chess[0]:
> The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65]
There was still some variation in the rules until the 19th century:
> The rules concerning stalemate were finalized in the early 19th century. Also in the 19th century, the convention that White moves first was established (formerly either White or Black could move first). Finally, the rules around castling were standardized – variations in the rules of castling had persisted in Italy until the late 19th century.
Is chess with different castling rules still chess? Chess without en passant?
Plus, it's easier to point to the set of rules that were standardised in the 19th century and call that chess. For a game like senet, there may never have been a standard set of rules. Or there may have been multiple standards that were all fairly popular, like poker.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...
Re: Senet
#34I 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.
I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.
Re: Senet
#35I remember as a kid having a shareware sampler that had some very nicely done videogame versions of Senet, Hnefatafl, the Royal Game of Ur, and some sort of a Pueblo board game . Peak late 90s skeumorphism, complete with little rendered win/loss cutscenes. Unless I can find that CD, it's probably gone forever though
Re: Senet
#36> Senet is the oldest known board game. 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] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon
You might be thinking of Ur, which is roughly 4,500 years old. This is an interesting video from Dr. Irving Finkel on it and its playing rules.[0]
Re: Senet
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing p…
It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern chess was at one time considered just a variant of chess[0]: > The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65] There was still some variation in the ru…
This is a great example of the fallacy of gray.
Compare the changes to the rules of chess you've described to the descriptions of senet's rules referenced by the wikipedia article[0]. If these are the best attempts at senet rule reconstruction that the article author could find, then I must assume that the rules are basically made up from scratch with nothing but a game board, some pieces, and the vaguest of references to the game in ancient texts. Familiarity with one of these so-called senet rulesets would be of no use at all to somebody playing the other, and I'm sure familiarity with both would be of no use at all to somebody wishing to play senet with any ancient player.
Classifications can be fuzzy, but they're not just a giant meaningless void of gray where anything goes. Chess has variants that can be placed on an evolutionary tree. Senet appears to have nothing but a handful of naive attempts at total reconstruction from practically no information. The game that was historically called senet appears to be lost.
Re: Senet
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hahaha. Have you ever clicked the "Random Article" button on Wikipedia? I learned the world has a _lot_ of tiny villages no one has ever heard of.
What if there were a recommender system in the loop that looked at which articles tend to be voted up and then would be more likely to submit articles that it thought HN would find interesting — would a uniform distribution filtered by a "probability to be well-upvoted" be a good way to do this?
Re: Senet
#39I remember as a kid having a shareware sampler that had some very nicely done videogame versions of Senet, Hnefatafl, the Royal Game of Ur, and some sort of a Pueblo board game . Peak late 90s skeumorphism, complete with little rendered win/loss cutscenes. Unless I can find that CD, it's probably gone forever though
There are a lot of people out there who remember shareware CDs. I'm always surprised by that particular aspect of software nostalgia. Same with things like ads in computer magazines; lots of people remember extremely well.
Did the game happen to be one of these?
Re: Senet
#40> 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…
Of course you're right. But the rules are not entirely unknown. For example, archeologists found the pieces. So, they know the dice are involved. And they likely correspond to rules for other similar games (roll and move, like backgammon or Ur). 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…
I urge you to read the sets of rules invented by the senet historians referenced in the wikipedia article. I think you are overstating their knowledge of the game. From wikipedia:
"Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game."
Here is the citation[0].
My belief is that these are two completely different games, and therefor probably completely different from any ancient iteration of senet.
Using the same game board and (some of) the same pieces is totally insufficient to call a game a "variation". Is old Japanese text, which adopted the Chinese writing system, a variant of the Chinese language?