Royal Game of Ur

I think I received this as a gift one Christmas, it was either from Santa or my parents, so… my parents. Like chess, it has simple rules, but many permutations in how you formulate your moves. Dating to 4500 BCE in Mesopotamia, it almost disappeared but for a Jewish population in Kochi (formerly, Cochin), India, who had continued to play it for who knows how long. They would bring it to Israel in the 1950s and soonafter it would be adapted into the simple board we know today (or knew, as I can no longer locate the version I had).

As to the name “Ur”, Wikipedia has this background:

The Game of Ur received its name because it was first rediscovered by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934. Copies of the game have since been found by other archaeologists across the Middle East. A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.