Hounds and jackals is the modern name given to an ancient Egyptian game that is known from several examples of gaming boards and gaming pieces found i...
Hounds and jackals is the modern name given to an ancient Egyptian game that is known from several examples of gaming boards and gaming pieces found in excavations. The modern name was invented by Howard Carter, who found one complete gaming set in a Theban tomb of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat IV that dates to the 12th Dynasty. The latter game set is one of the best preserved examples and is today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He called it Hounds contra Jackals. Another, less often used modern name is fifty-eight holes.
The gaming board has two sets of 29 holes. Gaming pieces are ten small sticks with either jackal or dog heads. The game appeared in Egypt, around 2000 BC and was mainly popular in the Middle Kingdom. In the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, Pharaoh Seti (Cedric Hardwicke) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) are shown playing the game.
Hounds and Jackals, also known as 58 Holes, is a well-known Bronze Age board game which was invented in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago. Hounds and Jackals appeared in Egypt, around 2000 BC and was mainly popular in the Middle Kingdom.
William Mathew Flinders Petrie initially discovered the game and published about it in 1890. More than 40 examples of the game have been revealed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, around the Levant and Mediterranean since that time.
Sticks were made of expensive materials such as ivory, silver and gold based on the findings at some of the archaeological sites. Wood was also used in the preparation of ordinary pegs, but such examples would not have survived.
The complete set of this Egyptian game discovered in 1910 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter is now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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REVERSI
Reversi is a strategy board game for two players, played on an 8×8 uncheckered board. It was invented in 1883. Othello, a variant with a change to the...
Reversi is a strategy board game for two players, played on an 8×8 uncheckered board. It was invented in 1883. Othello, a variant with a change to the board's initial setup, was patented in 1971.
There are sixty-four identical game pieces called disks (often spelled "discs"), which are light on one side and dark on the other. Players take turns placing disks on the board with their assigned color facing up. During a play, any disks of the opponent's color that are in a straight line and bounded by the disk just placed and another disk of the current player's color are turned over to the current player's color. The objective of the game is to have the majority of disks turned to display one's color when the last playable empty square is filled.
Goro Hasegawa claims that the origin of Reversi/Othello dates back 5,000 years. However, there is solid evidence that a game similar to Reversi/Othello existed since the 19th century.
Each of the disks' two sides corresponds to one player; they are referred to here as light and dark after the sides of Othello pieces, but any counters with distinctive faces are suitable. The game may for example be played with a chessboard and Scrabble pieces, with one player letters and the other backs.
The historical version of Reversi starts with an empty board, and the first two moves made by each player are in the four central squares of the board. The players place their disks alternately with their colors facing up and no captures are made. A player may choose to not play both pieces on the same diagonal, different from the standard Othello opening. It is also possible to play variants of Reversi and Othello where the second player's second move may or must flip one of the opposite-colored disks (as variants closest to the normal games).
For the specific game of Othello, the game begins with four disks placed in a square in the middle of the grid, two facing white-side-up, two dark-side-up, so that the same-colored disks are on a diagonal. Convention has this such that the dark-side-up disks are to the north-east and south-west (from both players' perspectives), though this is only marginally consequential: where sequential openings' memorization is preferred, such players benefit from this. The dark player moves first.
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