Irving Finkel

So you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end.

So it's difficult to describe the actual shape.

But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which there were two on one flank and two on the other, were all put at the end of the central avenue.

So you end up with 12 squares down the middle.

So all the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle and then four on each side at one end.

So it meant then that when you play the game, you have dice to move the pieces, you have pieces all the same, and you obviously put them on...

Your first corner, and you turn the corner, you go up the middle and off the end.

And it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood.

And some squares which had rosettes on were either safe squares or you had another throw.

And you could maybe put two on one square.

We don't know.

You could try and block people.

But anyway, the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape and its lasting thing shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it.

I mean, it may be that they were completely different games, but probably not.

So this is the thing.

It makes you wonder what would be about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons, different types of person.

And the thing is that although it's a race game where you're at the mercy of dice and

and lucky squares and unlucky squares, that the process of getting your pieces on and off the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous.

But it has built within it, it's the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy.

Yeah.