Game Design
2026
Game of Ur
[ CLIENT ]
Personal Project
[ ROLE ]
Game Design & Development
[ YEAR ]
2026
An art project about pace: the 4,600-year-old Royal Game of Ur on a wooden board in a sunlit clearing.
[ THE CHALLENGE ]
Can a 4,600-year-old game stay true to its rules, read clearly on a screen, and still feel like a slow afternoon?
A calm game, 4,600 years old
Ur: Game of Kings is an art project about pace. It is the Royal Game of Ur, the oldest board game whose rules we can still play. A board was dug out of a royal grave in the 1920s, and the rules were read off a Babylonian clay tablet by Irving Finkel at the British Museum. You race your pieces home along a fourteen-square route and hit your opponent on the way, against the computer or a friend on the same screen. Nothing is timed.
01 / AN OBJECT YOU WANT TO TOUCH
The board
Wooden squares with little bevels that catch the light, inlaid rosettes, and a wood texture that varies from square to square.
02 / BREAKING WITH AUTHENTICITY
The coins
Four coins replace the original triangular dice. Each that lands gold face up counts, from 0 to 4, and the pieces are polished silver and gold coins with glass beads set in them.
03 / THE PLACE
The clearing
A stone in a sunlit clearing, grass that moves, and a canopy that throws leaf shadows across the squares. Nothing is timed and nothing flashes.
04 / IRVING FINKEL'S READING
The rules
Each route is 14 squares: four on your own row, eight on the shared middle row, two back, then off on an exact throw. Rosettes give another toss, and the centre rosette is safe.
05 / ONE PLAYER
The computer
A computer opponent chooses its moves by the rules. In 300 headless games it beat a half-random player about 87% of the time.
06 / ONE SCREEN
Two players
Play the computer or a friend on the same screen, to 3, 5, 7 or 9 pieces, with no account, no lobby and no network.
Test: coins over dice
The original game was played with triangular dice, tetrahedrons with two marked corners each. On screen they were hard to read: the result depends on which corners point up, and the faces are small and angled. So I broke with authenticity and switched to four coins. Each coin that lands gold face up counts, from 0 to 4. The odds are exactly the ones the rules expect, and a throw reads at a glance.
Test: 300 headless games
The rules follow Irving Finkel's reading of the tablet. They live in one file with no engine nodes, so a headless test can play 300 games across 3, 5, 7 and 9 pieces to check them. The same test gave a number for tuning the opponent: the computer wins about 87% of games against a half-random player.
A serene place to play
The feeling I was aiming for was serenity. The board sits on a stone in a sunlit clearing, the grass moves, and the canopy throws leaf shadows across the squares. Nothing flashes, and every sound is a coin, a piece of wood or a quiet whistle. A scene this lush is heavy for a board game, so the textures are compressed, the reflection buffers are trimmed, and Low, Medium and High graphics trade effects, haze and grass density for speed on older machines.
Built to feel like an object
Most of the time went into making the board feel real: bevelled wooden squares, a PBR wood texture with variation per piece, silver and gold coins with five glass beads set in each, stone, grass and the canopy light. The look is warm and soft, so the whole scene stays calm. The logo is an overgrown stone signboard with vines, moss, a crown and a lion, generated with an image model in the same warm light, then upscaled and cut out for the menu.
Who did what
By hand: the serene mood, the choice to trade the original dice for coins, a board that looks like an object you want to touch, and the feel, checked by playing. With AI: the Godot code, the rules file, the test that plays hundreds of games, and the logo. Tools: Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Cursor, Gemini, Higgsfield, Figma Weave and Figma.
Where it stands
A finished game with a menu, a rules screen and a win screen, exported for Windows, macOS and Linux, with a trailer and a store page ready. Free, small, and about ten minutes a game.