Two added rules

[bopip]

Hello!

I've been playing Senet here with a friend and we noticed the game here misses two rules. As it's a milenary game, I don't think anyone knows its exact rules, but these are two rules that we play with and I think they could enhance(?) the game.

1. When 3 or more tokens align, the opponent shouldn't be able to jump over them. The tokens make a barricade and the other player can't go through.
2. No token can "exit" the board before the player removes all the tokens from the first line.

I hope it's not hard to implement and at least they can be optional rules and not mandatory. Also, I'm not sure if the first one was just a bug or not...

And that's all! Thank you for reading!

[SquashEngineer]

I agree there are significant variant rules available with millenary (sp) games, including Senet and another head-to-head game we play, The Royal Game of Ur. If you like Senet, you should give it a try.

I had not heard of the game options you presented. I'm not a super fan of either really - the 3 pawn block seems too powerful to me, and the other would mess up my strategy of regularly blocking my opponent early on the first row.

One variant I had seen previously, was the ability to send a player back to square one, if you land on them while they are on the Ankh space. This is not implemented on BGA either, nor have we house ruled it. I play on a home built board regularly. I love the odds with the sticks.

TIL: the new word "millenary."

[Igor-Thor]

I've seen these rules in other places but I prefer BGA's version which seems more streamlined without them.

[SimplicatusGames]

Thanks for the suggestions, it's always good to discuss rules in order to figure out why or why not they are useful to make the game interesting and playable. And even more so for these ancient games when we usually find only the components and not the rules (at least not the rules as they were back then - some games have evolved into modern versions - e.g. Chess - and some have evolved into multiple modern versions - e.g. Checkers).

1. When 3 or more tokens align, the opponent shouldn't be able to jump over them. The tokens make a barricade and the other player can't go through.

The only way to jump over 3 stones in a row is to throw a 4 or a 5, and that's only a 1/8 probability. So it's pretty much blocked already, and having a small possibility to get past a 3-group of stones makes it possible to keep the game moving forward. A total block will slow down the game as the opponent has no way to get past your block until you are forced to move your stones - usually because you have exited your first 2 stones from the board. It's not too hard to block all 5 of the opponents' stones with 3 of your own. And that often happens in games without this rule - you can even get 4 of your own stones off the board before the opponent gets their first stone off, if you are good and have some luck with the throws.

2. No token can "exit" the board before the player removes all the tokens from the first line.

Your proposed rule 1 would need to be combined with this one to avoid that you trap all 5 of the opponents' stones on the first line after a lucky start.

It makes more sense to have this rule on its own, as it would speed up moving all the stones out of the first row. But in the end, it doesn't matter so much which stone you move first or last, as the number of moves to the end is 29 and you have 5 stones, so you need to throw at least 145 with the sticks in total (if you don't get blocked and you get the perfect values to move all stones off the board), no matter how you move your stones.

So neither rule really adds something very valuable to the game.
Then why add these 2 rules, when it works just as well without them?
Fewer rules make the game easier to play.

The main problem with Senet, as pointed out in a different thread, is that it turns from strategic to pure luck when you have just 1 stone left and you're basically just hoping to get the right throw, similar to the end games in Ludo/Parcheesi and in Backgammon (which are btw perhaps both modern versions of Senet?).

So IMHO it's more useful to discuss rules that do something about that issue.

Do you have any house rules for the end game?