My Tweaks to the Royal Game of Ur

Earlier on in the year my class was set the task of individually playing The Royal Game of Ur in one of it's original forms. Then whilst playing the game we had to spot any areas of the game which we thought needed tweaking in order to make it more fun for the player. Whilst doing this few floors were found with the game mainly to assosheated with the rules of the game, so I decided to add a few rules of my own and modify some of them inorder to make the game more fun to play for the current generation of players

The first bug wihc was spotted with the game was that on occasion one player whilst throwing the dice would roll all zeros. And as much as it's very advantageous for the opponent, when this happens repeatedly ton the player who is rolling the zeros this can become boring and very frustrating as they are not progressing across the game board very quickly at all.

Even though this is a rare occurence in the game for players I decided to create a rule in place for this incase it heppens in the future. So to counter act this occurance I decided to imnplement a new rule, if one player rolls three zeros with the dice three turns in a row that player is allowed to throw the dice again straight afterwards untill they roll the dice and get a meaning ful value. When testing this new rule it because very useful and nearly eliminated the boredom factor. However it can become a bit complect after a while as the player has to keep count of how many time this happens ( I wish at the time I had created a counting device which would have made the taske a lot easier). Also with the rolling of all zeros this is a rare occurance so it is not always required. This game mechanic is called a negative feedback loop (Le Blank, 2004, pp. 447).

In the second iteration of the game it occured to me that some times one player would roll a high value with the dice yet with their avalibe counters on and off the board they were not able to take full advantage of their fortunate dice throw. After a while this can get on the player's nerves and creates boredom. So I decided to create another rule which borrows a game mechanic form the game Backgammon, which enables the player to split their roll across a number of different counters on the board. Confused? Let me explain again. If a player rolls higher than a value of one with the dice, and they have several counters avalible but non of them can be moved the full ammount rolled. Then this gives the player the option to move some counters a few spaces across the board thus, more of their counters are moving across the board and they can use their full dice roll. This is called a positive feel back loop as it gives the more fortunate player an advantage in the game (Le Blank, 2004, pp. 447).

Finally the last implementaton or iteration. Whilst playing the game it was also found that some players could gain an unfair advantage which would hinder the other player and creat boredom whilst playing. Some times one player would land their counter on a special square which means they could roll the dice for an extra go if they wished yet if they didn't roll anything then they would stay on the space intill their next turn. As a positive feed back loop this is good because it shortend the game and gives one player the advantage, however if the player in question ocuppys all of these spaces with their counters, then on ocasion the opponent is not able to progress as they counters cannnot hop over another or knock another off a special square. So in order to counter act this I implemented another new mechanic into the game, if a counter stays on any special square for three turns, it must progress across the board on the player's fourth turn. On implementing this new iterationthis rule proved very useful and made the game more fun as it added a level of strategy to it. However, later I discovered that it would have been more useful to create a countng device suck a numbered slider to count the number of turns this happened to avoide boredom and to help the players concentrate on the game itself.


These new tweaks to the game were tested with otherplayers and prooved to be fun and imporved on the game however I believe the game should be brought to a wider audience first so it can be fully enjoyed with the newly revamped rules in place.