http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/roma/rbgames.html
Has anyone tried playing anyone of these games?
I’m particularly interested in Latrunculi; a mixture of Chess, Draughts and Go, it says. Can anyone find a Java applet of this “thinking-man’s” game? Maybe Jeff could install one. A game more linked to language would be “The Lines of the Twelve Philosophers”. What does everyone make of it?
hi michaelyus, i’ve played the egyptian game senet before, it’s pretty good, try it 
there was a freeware version on the web a while ago. it might not be the “thinking-person’s” game… tutankhamun had some senet boards in his tomb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/tutankhamun_gallery_11.shtml
at high school while studying egyptian history, as well as learning facts i got to do things like try senet, and to embalm and mummify a rat, according it all the funerary rites due to a wealthy egyptian, including a sarcophagus covered with hieroglyphs… the benefits of having a really good ancient history teacher…
The Senet(or its predecessor) must have spread beyond borders and cultures. Koreans play “yoot” at the New Year’s Day(in lunar calendar) with similar rules. Four sticks with two sides are thrown to decide how far a pawn can go at a turn. Each player plays with four pawns. The player(or the team) who gets his/her pawns out of the board wins. But the board arangement is more spread out in two dimensions. And the path can divide or merge. Some of it is shaped like a circle with a cross in it, and some are square. But I used to play on a rhombic arangement containing four pythagorean triangles. It’s origin is not clearly known.
I’ve played senet with my siblings on that website tens of times.
Mummify a rat!!?? Wow! How bad is the stink? 
it doesn’t… you put it in this salt-solution which the egyptians used (the chemistry department did that) for weeks, after removing the internal bits (someone else did that as well ) and putting the bits in separate containers. afterwards you get something which is really dry, and if you’ve seen some of the mummified pharaohs, you’ll see how well this ancient drying technique preserves the features. it’s pretty disgusting in a way, but the history of it is interesting… like how the noble/royal families kept recently-deceased women in the house for a few days before handing them over to the embalmers, to avoid “corruption” by the embalmers…
this is all in the history books but i won’t go on, because it’s a bit off the “board games” topic
Perhaps you should start a spinoff thread on mummification; I’ve always found it fascinating. 