The Oldest Board Game Still Named

Senet is played on a grid of thirty squares arranged in three rows of ten, and boards or board fragments survive from as early as the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods of ancient Egypt, making it among the oldest board games in the world for which physical evidence, actual boards rather than only textual description, survives across an extraordinarily long span reaching into the New Kingdom and beyond.

For most of its long history senet appears to have functioned as an ordinary popular pastime enjoyed across Egyptian society, played by commoners and elites alike using thrown sticks or knucklebones to determine moves, and tomb paintings and models depicting people, sometimes explicitly the tomb owner, playing senet appear across a wide range of social contexts, evidence read by Egyptologists as showing the game's broad everyday popularity rather than a narrowly ceremonial function in its earlier centuries. The rules of ancient senet are not fully known with certainty, since no complete ancient rule text survives, and modern reconstructions, though grounded in surviving board layouts, iconography and comparison with related later games, necessarily involve some scholarly inference rather than direct unbroken transmission of the original playing rules.