Senet: play the game of passing online

Senet is a race game for two on a board of 30 squares in three rows of ten. Players move their pieces along an S-shaped track by throwing sticks, and the first to bear all of them off wins. Egyptians played it from about 3000 BC into Roman times. No rulebook survives, so every modern rule set is a reconstruction.

You can play right here, in the browser and without signing up: against the computer or with a friend on the same screen. Throw the four sticks, then tap a piece — the ones that can move are outlined, and the square they will land on lights up. The rules are those in the “How to play” section below: a pair cannot be hit, three in a row block the way, square 26 must be reached on an exact throw, and the House of Water sends a piece back to 15.

The computer plays a plain, sensible game: it bears off whenever it can, hits lone pieces, keeps its own in pairs and stays out of the water. Beat it once, then try the two-player mode with someone next to you.

The name comes from the Egyptian “znt”, “passing”. Fragments of boards that look like senet turn up in burials of the First Dynasty, around 3100 BC, and the first clear picture — a board drawn among other furnishings — is in the tomb of Hesy-Ra at Saqqara, around 2600 BC. Old Kingdom tomb walls then show people sitting over the board, mid-game.

By the New Kingdom the game had taken on a second meaning. Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead shows the dead person playing senet against an opponent who is not there, and Queen Nefertari plays alone in a painting in her tomb. Peter Piccione, who studied the game for his doctorate, argues that senet came to stand for the soul’s passage through the underworld — the squares at the end of the track carry signs of rebirth and of the sun.

Tutankhamun went to his tomb with several game boxes: senet on one side, the game of twenty squares on the other, and drawers for the pieces, throwing sticks and knucklebones (W. J. Tait catalogued them in 1982). The game even made it into satire: a papyrus in the British Museum shows a lion playing senet against a gazelle. People scratched boards into stone wherever they sat and waited — some survive on the roof of the temple at Dendera. More on the boards and the Met’s collection in the museum’s article on senet and twenty squares.

The track snakes through the board: squares 1 to 10 along the top row, 11 to 20 back along the middle, 21 to 30 along the bottom. Each player has five pieces in most sets, sometimes seven — one side cone-shaped, the other shaped like spools. Instead of dice the Egyptians threw four flat sticks, light on one side and dark on the other, or knucklebones.

Here is what four fair sticks give, and how often. The numbers are our own calculation: each stick lands light side up half the time.

So a 2 is the most common throw, and you get an extra throw 37.5 % of the time. Real sticks are rarely that fair: a flat side and a rounded side do not land equally often, which is one more reason ancient play may have felt different.

Five squares near the end are marked on New Kingdom boards, and square 15 often is too. The names below follow the reconstruction of the American Egyptologist Timothy Kendall (1978); other authors read the signs a little differently.

• 15, House of Rebirth — the ankh; pieces washed out of square 27 start again here.
• 26, House of Beauty — the hieroglyph “nefer”, “beautiful, good”; every piece has to stop here.
• 27, House of Water — the trap: a piece that lands here goes back to 15.
• 28, House of Three Truths and 29, House of Re-Atum — on many boards marked with three and two signs; a piece leaves from them only on an exact throw.
• 30, House of Horus — the last square, linked to the rising sun.

These rules are a modern reconstruction based on Timothy Kendall’s (1978), in the form many modern sets print. The Egyptians’ own rules have not survived and probably changed over two thousand years. Other reconstructions, such as R. C. Bell’s, differ in the details.

1. Two players, five pieces each. Set them up alternately on squares 1–10: cones on the odd squares, spools on the even ones. Throw the sticks to decide who starts.
2. Count the light sides: 1, 2, 3 or 4 squares; no light sides means 5. After a 1, 4 or 5 you throw again; after a 2 or 3 the turn passes.
3. Each throw moves one piece forward along the track by exactly that many squares. You may not land on your own piece.
4. Land on a single enemy piece and you swap places: it goes back to the square you came from.
5. Two pieces of one colour standing next to each other protect each other — they cannot be attacked. Three in a row also form a wall that the other side cannot jump over.
6. If no piece can move forward, you lose the rest of the turn. (Some versions make you move backwards instead.)
7. Square 26 cannot be skipped: every piece must land on it exactly. From 26, a 1 drops the piece into the water of square 27 and it goes back to 15 (or the nearest free square before it); a 2, 3 or 4 moves it to 28, 29 or 30; a 5 takes it straight off the board.
8. A piece on 28 leaves only on a 3, on 29 only on a 2, on 30 only on a 1 — the throw that carries it exactly one square past 30. Pieces on 26–30 cannot be attacked.
9. The first player to bear off all five pieces wins.

Cones stand on 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, spools on 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. The cones throw first.

1. Cones throw two light sides — 2. The front cone goes from 9 to 11, past the lone spool on 10. A 2 gives no extra throw, so the turn passes.
2. Spools throw four light sides — 4. The spool on 10 runs to 14 and earns another throw: 2, from 14 to 16. The turn passes.
3. Cones throw all dark — 5. The cone on 11 lands on 16, where a spool stands alone: they swap, and the spool goes back to 11. A 5 means another throw: 1. The cone on 7 hits the lone spool on 8, which drops back to 7. A 1 means yet another throw: 3, and the cone on 16 moves on to 19.

After three turns the cones lead with a piece on 19, but look at the spools: two of them now stand side by side on 6 and 7. That pair cannot be attacked — the simplest defence in the game, and the first thing worth learning.

At the end of the track the race slows down. Say a cone sits on 26. A 1 sends it into the House of Water and back to 15 — a painful loss. A 5 takes it off the board at once. Holding a pair on 24 and 25 while you wait for the right throw is often worth more than rushing.

Soon the city will have a senet table: a game for two against a friend or another player, with the same reconstruction you can try on this page. We will announce it in the news when it opens; until then it is on our roadmap.

Meanwhile senet lives in the street: the slabs of the avenue of sphinxes in front of the halls have senet boards scratched into them (see the news), and the AI residents sometimes suggest a game after sunset. At home you can play on a printed board with five coins of each kind and four lolly sticks painted on one side. The other ancient games, from mehen to hounds and jackals, are on the page about the games of ancient Egypt.