Forgotten Ancient Board Games You Have Never Heard Of

Chess and checkers feel timeless, but they're actually the young end of board game history. For thousands of years before them, two players sitting across a grid or a track was already a familiar sight, just with games almost nobody remembers today. Here are five of them, roughly in the order they appeared.

Senet: racing through the afterlife

Senet is the oldest board game we have real evidence for, with boards and fragments turning up in Egyptian burials dating back to around 3100 BC. It started out as a simple race game, two players moving pieces along a grid of thirty squares, but over the centuries it picked up religious weight: the squares came to represent divine forces and stages of the journey into the afterlife. Pharaohs were buried with Senet boards so they'd have something to play in the next world.

Petteia: Greece's game of strategy

By classical Greece, Senet-style racing had given way to something closer to real strategy. Petteia was played on a grid with two sets of colored pieces, and the goal was to trap an opponent's piece between two of your own to capture it. It was popular enough that Aristotle used it as a metaphor, comparing a person cut off from their city-state to an isolated piece in Petteia: surrounded, and about to be taken.

Latrunculi: Rome's "little soldiers"

The Romans took Petteia's capture mechanic and ran with it. Ludus Latrunculorum, "the game of little soldiers," shows up in Roman writing as early as the first century BC, played on boards of different sizes with pieces carved from glass or semi-precious stone. It was explicitly framed as a test of military thinking, close enough to real tactics that it doubled as a way for soldiers to sharpen their instincts off the battlefield.

Nine Men's Morris: the game that traveled everywhere

Few games have shown up in as many places as Nine Men's Morris. Boards for it have been scratched into Egyptian roof tiles from around 1400 BC, carved into Bronze Age stone in Cyprus, and even etched into the paving of the Roman Forum. Each player has nine pieces and tries to line up three in a row, forming a "mill," while blocking the other side from doing the same. It needed nothing but a flat surface and something to scratch a grid into, which is probably exactly why it outlived so many fancier games.

Alquerque: the ancestor hiding inside checkers

Alquerque comes from the Middle East and is first written about in the 10th century, in a list of games compiled by the scholar Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani. Players jump over each other's pieces to capture them, on a board of crossing diagonal lines, a mechanic that should sound familiar. When the game reached medieval Europe and was adapted to a checkered board, it became the direct ancestor of modern checkers.

Boards weren't the only ancient decision tool, either. Some cultures skipped strategy entirely and reached for hand gestures or bones and dice instead.

Same instinct, different centuries

Trap, capture, block, race, these five games cover almost every basic idea that board games still run on. Chess and checkers didn't invent strategy on a grid; they inherited it from games most people have never even heard of. If you want a version of that same "two players, one board, may the better strategist win" instinct that only takes a few seconds, rock paper scissors online is the fastest surviving descendant.