Ur Game: The Game of Ancient Gods

"Ur Game" is a PC conversion of the oldest board game in the recorded history of mankind that we still know how to play, the "Royal Game of Ur". In this game, two players compete in moving all their 7 tokens from a "start" area to a "finish" area. Movement is turn-based. In each turn, the player throws dice that result in a number between 0 and 4, then he moves one of his tokens forward by the respective number of tiles. The board contains safe spaces for each player as well as a stretch that both players' tokens must pass. In this shared area, a player can send an opposing player's token back to the starting area by landing on its space. The game is thus similar to Pachisi/Parcheesi. The game includes luck elements (the dice rolls) as well as skill (the decision of which token to move). Different strategies are possible: You can play aggressively and focus on resetting your opponent's progress, or you can focus on moving your own tokens as fast as possible. Lining up several tokens in your safe area takes more time than just moving one token forward, but makes it easier to reset an opponent's token once it enters the shared area. However, once you _do_ reset an opponent's token, your own token now sits on that vulnerable space. There are also a few spaces on the board that grant you an extra die throw, and deciding when to enter and leave those is another important decision. The game tends to get close and dramatic toward the end. This happens because in order to win, you must bring all your 7 tokens to the finish area. Naturally, the fewer tokens you have left, the fewer tactical options you have for movement, so the player who's in front will often have a tactical disadvantage that allows the trailing player to catch up. In addition to that, tokens must hit the finish area exactly (they are not allowed to overshoot), so the end game typically shows one player trying to get the correct die roll to move their last token to the finish, while the other player tries to move all _their_ remaining tokens along the now unopposed shared area. I don't think the game provides enough complexity and tactical options to keep a contemporary boardgamer's attention for long, but it _is_ enjoyable for quick casual rounds, and it's easy to understand why this game maintained its popularity for millennia. Let's take a look at this PC conversion specifically. It sports faithful, crisp graphics and even a 3D scene with animations for both opponents. Controls are intuitive and quick. A video tutorial explains the rules clearly. While the game won't win awards for its presentation, it's a polished product with good attention to detail. The developers definitely went above and beyond the call of duty here - not by a huge margin, but in an age where lots of games are designed after "minimum viable product" principles, that's nevertheless much appreciated. The game provides an AI opponent with three available difficulty levels. I only played the hardest difficulty so far ("Expert AI"), and unfortunately it wasn't very strong. It could handle itself well in the early and mid game, but failed to play a compelling endgame. Its attempts at bringing its last few tokens to the finish didn't show a good grasp of strategy, and when it was trailing behind, it kept strengthening its starting zone instead of trying to hunt down my last token. I would expect this AI to lose against a skilled opponent most of the time, though it should be strong enough to get away with an occasional victory if the dice roll in its favor. (Edit: In response to a forum post, the developer updated the AI on the next day, and provided another update 4 days later. I haven't played since then, but I'm definitely impressed by the speedy response!) In addition to playing against the AI, the game offers a local hotseat mode (two players taking turns on the same PC) as well as online matches against another player ("public" and "ranked"). To start a ranked match, you need to invite someone from your friend list, but they need to own the game. Applying for a "public" match apparently tries to match you with another player who is also currently looking for a public match. The game does not show a list of currently running games, nor a list of people currently available to play. That's a bit clunky, but at least the option to play online is there, which is more than many other games provide. Unfortunately there is no campaign or story mode, which would have provided more mid-term motivation. There are a few achievements to get for those who are motivated by that, though. Challenge modes that give you a handicap (e.g. more tokens or less dice), or modes with changed rules, could also have been interesting. But it seems that the developers' goal was simply to provide an accurate rendition of this historic game rather than expanding on it, which is fine, especially considering its price point. I recommend the game to boardgame aficionados as well as people interested in the history of games. The game is fairly priced and well worth a look. Just don't expect to spend a lot of time with it, especially if you usually want more complexity in the games you play.

At first glance it looks simple, but what a great board game. Didnt know the game actually existed. You can turn the tide on the last minute even when you think you will loose. Showing emotions during the play can be funny sometimes. Good balance between chance and tactics. Loving it. Great to play with a friend.

This game is super fun. It feels a like simplified backgammon. If you are looking for something fun and casual, you should consider this. Here is some gameplay so you know what to expect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0XecR2qn3g

An ancient game - I'd never heard of before. It's quite enjoyable albeit a little simple. The animations of the god avatars are brilliantly funny though, as they gesture death threats over pepperonis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgAZv9SaAFY

This is a fantastic little game, kind of like a poor mans backgammon. Lots of fun. Just wish there were more people online to play with.

"Ur Game: The Game of Ancient Gods" is a mobile-app like port of an ancient and not really played much boardgame (because it's not all that great to begin with). One of the big problems here is in terms of the general design and the way the boardgame was ported. There's two aspects of any game. The mechanics of the game, and the interface that the players have with that mechanic. Poker, for example, is about randomly generated hands that players get, and the interface is the randomly drawn paper cards. If you keep the random hand, but remove the physical cards, the game still works, but it's streamlined, more pure. That's video gaming. The best video games put the players directly against the core game mechanic. We don't love games because of their interfaces, we love them for their mechanics. The less that the interface gets in the way, the better. So here, we have a boardgame/cardgame conversion, and the focus of the developers has clearly been to keep, and emulate the annoying physical interface, without bothering to improve on the mechanics or put the players closer to them. As a result of this hamfisted decision, the game is clunky and annoying to play compared to games that were designed from scratch to be PC games. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. Worse, the game immediately tries to shove the display into HDR (even if it's running in a window, and even if the system doesn't fully support HDR). This is completely incompetent and unacceptable game development, and is a very solid reason to avoid the game. The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Ur Game: The Game of Ancient Gods" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 10 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "Ur Game: The Game of Ancient Gods" has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.

Addictive little game, especially for times like these. Would you like to play a board game with your friend, but you can't due to corona? Try this game, it's fun, and I can say it's definitely one of those games, in which you and your friend would be like "rematch?" after each game :) Pros: + easy to play, hard to master (due to combination of luck and tactic/strategy) + low price + multiplayer + bots (various difficulty, so you can practice your tactic and skill to beat your friend next time ;) ) + achievements + addictive + no bugs found + fully voiced tutorial in 4 languages :) + low system requirements + leaderboard + it's very interesting from the point of history, as it is one of the oldest board games :) Cons: - addictive - no character customization (no big deal, but some people would welcome that probably)

Nice implementation of an ancient game. Playing against an animated IA is fun. It has 3 levels of difficulty, so everyone can play it. I really like it.

Recently watched that British Museum Royal Game of UR video. Then realized I forgot I had this game. Very well put together!

Muy entretenido y un diseño disfrutable. Necesita online abierto.