The Royal Game of Ur is an ancient race game where the player must be the first to exit his tokens from the board.
This cartridge features:
- 6 different AIs which are unlocked as the player wins games
- 3 different rulesets and the ability to create your own custom ruleset
At the start of the cartridge, the main menu has 4 entries (left-right to cycle the entries):
- new game: play a game by selecting a ruleset, an AI level and by defining who plays first
- rules description: explain briefly each of the ruleset (top menu for the ruleset, bottom menu for each rule information)
- edit custom rule: define your own ruleset
- reset game: reset all game progressions and custom ruleset to factory settings. IMPORTANT WARNING: it doesn't request for confirmation once selected by X.
The rulesets are:
- basic: simple race game which can be played against the first 2 AI levels
- intermediate: simple race game with simple betting which can be played against the first 4 AI level. Winning against the AI player unlocks further AI players
- advanced: complex race game with complex betting which can be played against the last 4 AI levels
- custom: user defined ruleset with its own game progression. The player must win against the lower AI players to unlock the next ones.
Designer notes:
I have been inspired by the essay and videos of Mr Irving L. Finkel regarding the royal game of Ur. I wanted the player to play this ancient boardgame versus Assyrians and feel a distant connection to this long past era.
The game does not have any music since I did not have the time to compose one. However, if enough players request for it, i will try to add an assyrian one.
Enjoy. May Pazuzu be with you !
PS: the cartridge illustration is a bas-relief sculpture of the benevolent assyrian god Pazuzu. This bas-relief can be seen at the British Museum.
Interesting game! I'd heard of The Royal Game of Ur, but none of the betting rules you incorporated - made for a weird challenge!
It's a little frustrating that beating the Scribe doesn't unlock the General, though - I skipped over the Guard because I've played the game enough not to need that challenge, but it sounds like I have to play against them after all.
The art is quite nice, though - I like their little faces - and like I said, the betting rules were interesting and new.
This is so cool! Well implemented and beautifully illustrated. I love the opponent characters!
Ah, I see you are using my old image compressor, @red_ghost_71. Glad it could help !
You may be interested in my much sleeker recently rewritten 2021 Image Compressor. It is self-contained at 16-lines of code instead of having multiple functions all over the place like the one you are using here - and with better compression.
This is great. It looks really good. One thing I'd change:
On the main screen when choosing New Game, Rules Description, etc. it ould look nicer if the words were always centered. You can do this by entering this as the x-position for that printed string:
64-#string*2 |
This works as long as you use text and no shift-character images, since every text character has a width of 4 pixels. Since you have the arrow button symbols in there, which have a width of 8 pixels, you should put:
60-#string*2 |
to account for the extra 4 pixels on the left side.
Well done. I love the Game of Ur and it's played frequently in our house. It's been on my list to try and make a Pioc8 Ur but I'm glad someone finally go to it and made a great conversion.
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