Tabletop Day International

International Tabletop Day is April 29th.

Anyone plan to celebrate it by playing The Royal Game of Ur, the oldest known tabletop game?

Note: The 1995 Sci-Fi cult movie briefly featured the game being played.

Since the stone tablet found by archeologists only contained a major portion of the rules, but not all of them, there can be several variations of this Royal Game of Ur a/k/a Game of Twenty Squares.

Quote: FleaStiff

Anyone plan to celebrate it by playing The Royal Game of Ur, the oldest known tabletop game?

I used to have that game when I was a kid. Parker Brothers, or one of their competitors, made a board game version out of it. They admitted in the rules they were just making an educated guess based on the original pieces. Must have played it hundreds of times. I haven't thought of that game in decades. I'd celebrate by playing it but my dad probably threw it away 35 years ago.

There are several sites at which you can play online and I believe that The British Museum will host an online charitable exposition game on the International Tabletop Day.

According to Wikipedia, the Egyptian game Senet is older by 900 years. I've never played either but my daughter and I used to play Nine Man Morris, which supposedly dates back to 1400 BC. One nice thing about Morris is you can play it anywhere. We used to play while waiting to be served in restaurants. We would draw the board on a place mat then use sugar packets and Sweet and Low packets as the pieces.

Quote: Wizard

...I'd celebrate by playing it but my dad probably threw it away 35 years ago.

Hehe... Klaus knows the missing rules, but the first one is "Don't tell anyone the missing rules".

Quote: Ayecarumba

Hehe... Klaus knows the missing rules, but the first one is "Don't tell anyone the missing rules".

Logic Puzzle Time!

That reminds of this riddle:

You are sentenced to death. You are sent before the king, who will decide how it will be carried out. The king says to you, "You may make one statement before I choose your method of death. If you make a true statement, you will be killed by lions. If you make a false statement, you will be killed by wild dogs."

What should your statement be?

As always, please put answers in spoiler tags.

Were I to play a tabletop game, I'd opt for a very, very simple one we played when I was a kid.

Opponents sit facing themselves across a table top: typically kitchen table, or table in a restaurant: make certain the surface is clean and not wet.

The only playing piece is a penny.

The rules are simple: each player gets three successive attempts to tap/nudge the penny with their fingenails pressed against the tabletop; a point is scored if by the third tap the penny has a portion of its body hanging over the edge on the opposite side, without first falling off.

Each tap must be quick and not a slow, controlling push: that's cheating.