How to Play Senet

What You Need

• A board of 3 rows × 10 columns — thirty squares, called "houses".
• 5 cone pieces for one player and 5 spool pieces for the other.
• 4 two-sided throwing sticks, each with one flat light face and one curved dark face.

Setting Up

1. The pieces alternate along the first ten squares of the path — cones on the even squares, spools on the odd.
2. The path snakes: left-to-right across the top row, right-to-left across the middle, then left-to-right across the bottom.
3. The player whose lead piece sits on square 10 throws first.

The Throwing Sticks

Throw all four sticks together and count the light faces showing — that's your move, from 1 to 4. If all four land dark, you move 5. After moving on a 1, 4, or 5 you throw again; a 2 or 3 ends your turn after the move.

How to Play - The Rules

1. Move one piece forward by the number thrown. You may never land on your own piece.
2. Land on a lone enemy piece and you swap places with it — a setback that can be devastating late in the race.
3. Two enemy pieces on adjacent squares protect each other and cannot be attacked. Three in a row form a wall that your pieces cannot pass.
4. If you cannot move forward, you must move a piece backward. If no move exists at all, the throw is forfeited.
5. Every piece must land exactly on square 26, the House of Beauty, before entering the final squares.
6. Square 27 is the House of Water: a piece that falls in is carried back to square 15, the House of Rebirth.
7. The last squares demand exact throws: bear off from square 26 with a 5, from 28 (House of the Three Truths) with a 3, from 29 (House of Re-Atoum) with a 2; from square 30 (House of Horus) any throw bears off. The final five houses are safe from attack.
8. The first player to bear all five pieces off the board wins.

Strategy Tips

Cultural History

Senet is attested from around 3100 BCE in Predynastic Egypt all the way through the Roman period, making it one of the oldest board games on Earth. The earliest clear depiction of the game appears in the tomb of Hesy-Ra (c. 2620 BCE), and its players spanned the whole of Egyptian society — from laborers with boards scratched into stone to Tutankhamun, who was buried with four ornate sets of ebony and ivory.

By the New Kingdom the game had become a religious allegory of the soul's passage through the Duat, the Egyptian underworld. The final five houses of the board map the trials of judgment, and Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead opens with the deceased playing Senet against an unseen opponent. Queen Nefertari's tomb famously paints her mid-game against an invisible adversary — her own fate.

No rulebook survives from ancient Egypt. Modern play rests on scholarly reconstructions pieced together from tomb paintings, game texts, and surviving boards. This implementation follows Timothy Kendall's 1978 reconstruction, the standard for modern play.