Hounds and Jackals

Also known as The Game of 58 Holes, this is one of the oldest board games we know of — it was played in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, around 2000 BCE, and sets have been found from the Nile to Mesopotamia. The surviving boards are carved from wood, ivory, and faience, shaped like a shield, an axe-head, or a violin, and the pegs are topped with the carved heads of hounds and jackals.

No rulebook survived. These rules are the standard modern reconstruction, based on the boards themselves — the two tracks, the linked holes, and the holes marked with the nefer sign.

A pure race. Get all five of your pegs from your kennel to hole 29, the Shen — the hieroglyph of a rope tied in an endless loop, meaning eternity. The first player to retire all five pegs into the Shen wins.

Each player runs a separate track of 29 holes (58 holes in total, which is where the game's other name comes from). Because the tracks never touch, there is no capturing: you race the board and the sticks, not your opponent's pegs.

Your track runs from the top outer corner of the shield:

The Egyptians used throwing sticks and knucklebones rather than cubic dice. Four two-sided sticks are thrown at once, and what you count is the number of marked faces showing:

Press Cast the sticks to throw. The number you rolled is shown beside the tray.

Each turn you throw once and then move one peg by exactly that many holes.

To move, press the hole holding the peg you want to advance, then press the hole it will come to rest on. The board highlights both, and the destination it shows is where the peg actually ends up — links already followed.

Read the panel, not the track. After every throw, the panel lists each move the throw allows as "hole 1 to 20". That matters because a link can send a peg to the far side of the board: a peg on hole 1 throwing a 5 lands on hole 6 and is carried up to hole 20, which is on the centre column, nowhere near where the peg started. When that happens the panel says so.

Four holes on each track are joined in pairs by lines carved across the board. They work exactly like the chutes and ladders of the modern game, and they fire when you land on the hole:

A hole's rim tells you which it is: gold holes send you forward, carnelian red holes send you back.

A link fires only once. Riding the link from 6 up to 20 does not then send you back down to 6 — you arrived by the link, not by landing on it. The same is true in reverse.

Holes 15, 25, 28, and 29 are marked with the nefer hieroglyph, which means "good" or "beautiful". Come to rest on one and you throw again. Together with throws of 1 and 5, this is what gives the game its long, swinging turns.

You must throw the exact number to enter hole 29. A peg on hole 27 needs a 3 and nothing else; a 4 or a 5 cannot be used by that peg, though you may be able to move another one instead. A peg that reaches the Shen is retired and never moves again.

The first player to retire all five pegs into the Shen wins the race into eternity.