The Royal Game of Ur

The 4,600-year-old Mesopotamian race game, on a hand-painted watercolour board. Play it at ur.littleberrylodge.co.uk.

• Vs computer: three strengths (Squire, Knight, King). The computer looks ahead over every possible dice roll. Advise me shows what the King would play, and why: unlimited against the Squire, five times a game against the Knight. Against the Squire the board also shades each square by the chance he can land there next turn, and Undo takes back your last move until you roll again.
• Two players: pass-and-play on one device.
• Online: invite a friend with a link, a QR code or a six-letter code (typed or scanned with Join with a code) and play in step on both devices. Games are recorded in Stats, offered again if you come back without the link, and leaving one counts as a loss. It needs the Worker (see Run locally).
• Rules: Irving Finkel's reconstruction from the British Museum tablet, the longer routes of James Masters (16 squares) and H. J. R. Murray (27), the doubling-back route drawn on Wikipedia, and two house variants (Quick and Raiders), chosen with Variant before a game.
• Guided first game: new players get tips as each rule first comes up; it can be replayed from Options.
• Animated counters and dice, sound effects made in the browser, and background music.
• Keyboard play: R or Space to roll, number keys or arrows and Enter to move, A for advice, U to undo (against the Squire).
• Installable and offline: install it from the browser or Options, and it keeps working with no connection.
• Stats for the current game and all time, saved in the browser.

Run locally

Run npm install once, then:

npm run dev

This builds the site and runs wrangler dev, which serves the game and its online-play Worker at http://localhost:8787. Online play needs it.

Everything else is a static site, so it also runs straight from the source. You can open index.html directly, but offline support and installing only work when the folder is served over HTTP:

python3 -m http.server 8000

Checking and building

Run npm install once (and npx playwright install chromium for the browser tests), then:

Command	What it does
npm run format	Tidies every file with Prettier
npm run format:check	Lists any file Prettier would change
npm run lint	Checks the scripts with ESLint, the styles with Stylelint and the page with html-validate
npm run typecheck	Type-checks the scripts with TypeScript, from their JSDoc (nothing is compiled)
npm test	Runs the unit tests of the rules, then the browser tests with Playwright (set SITE_ROOT=dist to play the built site, as CI does)
npm run dev	Builds, then runs the game and the online-play Worker locally with wrangler dev, at http://localhost:8787
npm run check	All of the above, as CI runs them
npm run build	Builds the site into dist/: the stylesheets joined into one file and the scripts into another, in the page's order, and everything minified
npm run lighthouse	Builds, then audits dist/ with Lighthouse; reports go in .lighthouseci/

The online browser tests run a Worker of their own at http://localhost:8788, with its rooms kept apart in .wrangler/e2e-state, so a running npm run dev is never mistaken for it.

Committing runs Prettier, ESLint, Stylelint and html-validate on the staged files. GitHub Actions runs the checks, the tests and Lighthouse on every push and pull request, and Dependabot proposes updates to the tools.

Project layout

Path	What it holds
index.html	The page markup, dialogs and SVG definitions
css/*.css	Styles, one file per part of the page (base.css holds the colours, fonts and page)
js/rules.js	The board, the rules, rule variants and the computer opponent (no page code)
js/sound.js	Synthesised sound effects
js/turns.js	The rules of a turn, shared by the page and the Worker (no page code)
js/game.js	Game state, the turn sequence, and making moves
js/stats.js	Stats recording and the Stats window
js/honours.js	Honours (achievements): what earns them, and the Honours tab
js/board.js	Drawing the board, counters, dice and move arrows; render()
js/speech.js	What the characters say, and their speech bubbles
js/portraits.js	Player portraits and expressions
js/banner.js	The win or lose banner at the end of a game
js/card.js	The result card: a shareable picture of a finished game
js/prefs.js	Saved preferences
js/backdrop.js	The animated background behind the page
js/icons.js	Hand-drawn toolbar icons
js/bubbles.js	Pinning a note beside something (guide tips, advice)
js/advice.js	Advise me
js/danger.js	Danger shading against the Squire
js/undo.js	Undo against the Squire
js/guide.js	The guided first game
js/newgame.js	Starting games, the set-up board, confirming before a game is lost
js/options.js	The Options window
js/variants.js	The variant picker and which rules are in play
js/controls.js	Roll, Sound, Route, and the mode and opponent choices
js/modals.js	The Rules, Strategy, Options and Stats windows
js/keyboard.js	Keyboard play
js/install.js	Installing the app and offline support
js/online.js	Online play in the page: saved seats, the room's API and socket, and playing its states
js/lobby.js	Inviting, joining and rejoining an online game, and the notes for full or ended rooms
js/qrcode.js	QR codes for invite links (vendored qrcode-generator, MIT)
js/scan.js	Scanning an invite's QR code with the camera, for Join with a code
vendor/jsqr.js	Reading QR codes from the camera where the browser can't (vendored jsQR, Apache 2.0), loaded only on a first scan
js/music.js	Background music
js/main.js	Start-up
sw.js, manifest.webmanifest, icons/	Offline support and installing
css/lobby.css	Styles for the invite, join and rejoin windows
worker/	The Cloudflare Worker and its Durable Object that hold online rooms
wrangler.jsonc	The Worker's configuration
scripts/shared-module.mjs	Lets the Worker import the shared rules from the page's plain scripts
css/fonts.css, fonts/	The game's fonts, served with it (each under the SIL Open Font License; see fonts/*-OFL.txt)
scripts/build.mjs	The deployment build
tests/unit/	Unit tests of the rules and the computer opponent (Node's test runner)
tests/e2e/	Browser tests: whole games, honours, danger shading and undo, music, tray counters (Playwright)

The scripts are plain, non-module scripts loaded in that order and share one scope, so a file can use anything from the files before it.

Deploy to Cloudflare Workers

The Worker serves the site and runs online games.

1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Workers & Pages → Create → Import a repository and connect this repository with Workers Builds.
2. Build command npm run build, deploy command npx wrangler deploy.
3. Move ur.littleberrylodge.co.uk from the Pages project to the Worker (Settings → Domains & Routes), then retire the Pages project.

Every push to the production branch redeploys.

Licence

Copyright © 2026 MrSuttonmann.

The game is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version. If you run a modified version as a website, the licence requires you to offer its source code to the people who use it.

The music is not covered by this licence; see Credits.

Credits

Music: "Village Consort", "Folk Round" and "Lord of the Land" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.

Invite QR codes: qrcode-generator by Kazuhiko Arase, licensed under the MIT licence.

Scanning QR codes: jsQR by Cosmo Wolfe, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.