Let's tweak - The Royal Game of Ur

Earlier in my blog I wrote about an ancient board game called 'The Royal Game of Ur' which was a board game that was discovered in the South of Iraq in Ur (hence its name)

Our last two lectures were spent looking back at the board games we had chosen to write about in our assignments and to tweak/iterate them however we wanted to. For my tweaks I came up with 2 tweaks:

Use a 6-sided die

Rather than using the stick dice or the triangular shaped dice, I decided to use a more commonly used die which is extremely popular in today's date of playing board games: a 6-sided die. Despite being the most mainstream way of tweaking a board game I wanted to see whether allowing the player to roll a 5 or 6 could actually change how the game plays through and if it's any better or not.
I played a few games with some of my class mates and did pick up on two interesting points:

- The traditional dice highest roll was a 4 which would be quite exciting for the player to get, especially if their piece was on a star or not on the board yet. This meant they could get another go and if they roll another 4 are able to move onto another star for another go. 

-With the introduction of rolling a 5 and 6 this meant there were less 4s being rolled and players were looking to get a 6 instead, after all, it's the new highest number to roll and thus you'll get further with a 6. However, I felt more excited than before when I did roll a 4 and got to move my piece straight from off the board onto the star for another go. 

Overall however, the 6 sided die made the game lose some of its originality alongside todays more recent games and thus I prefer to use the original dice.

Any roll allows you to take your piece off the board

Rather than aiming to try and roll the perfect amount to finally get your piece off the board, I tweaked it so that you can roll any number and if the amount of moves is less than your roll, you can move your piece off the board. This was to try and make the game faster as the player is not trying to aim for a perfect roll (which believe me, happened a lot). Depending on what you're position on the board, this worked well as well as badly:

- this tweak worked well if your pieces are near the end and you only need to roll to get your piece off, especially if it's your last piece. It is relieving knowing that you'll know the next roll guarantees a victory rather than building up stress as the luck of the roll is working against you, allowing your opponent to catch up.

- however, this tweak also works against you if you're on the other end of the game, being the one trying to catch up to the other player. I did start to feel a sense of defeat even before the game ended when my opponent only needed to roll a few more times to win the game as there was no way I could catch up with the amount of pieces I had left (cursing my luck on the rolls, everyone blames it right?) Therefore this tweak could lead to some players quitting way before the game ends as the rule where you must roll the perfect number to leave the board acted as a last hurdle to allow the opponent to catch up.

Overall

I do enjoy playing The Royal game of Ur, I also have thought up of lots of different iterations and tweaks such as:

- allowing the player to move more than one piece in a roll (e.g.: roll a 3, move one piece two spaces and another one space)

- bring in a second set of dice which the player must control two pieces during a turn

- Modifying the game so much to allow up to 4 players (a very ambicious idea however, but could be possible in my eyes)

However, I never got to implement or test these ideas out...yet. But I hope to do so in the future.