That moment you realize you're not playing a heavily modified version of giant senet in "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation" (1999), because you're actually playing a modified version of the game of twenty/Twenty Squares
(Image from "The Game of Twenty Squares" from cyningstan.com http://www.cyningstan.com/game/1061/the-game-of-twenty-squares)
Also, before we start off, credit to "Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Borders" (2016) by Walter Crist, Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, and Alex do Voogt for more background on the various ancient board games. I am not an archaeologist or historian, but these folks are (also they go way more into detail on the individual games, naming arguments, rules, geographical movements, etc., than I will because this post is long enough).
(You can purchase an ebook copy on Books (iOS) and Kobo, and a physical in most places books are sold; I get nothing from the sale, it’s just a very interesting book)
So I haven’t found anyone who’s written or vlogged about this in ~23 years of this video game’s existence, so I guess it’s down to me, having too much free time and an interest in going down a research rabbit hole.
I’ve wanted to be an Egyptologist since I was like 7, so learning senet - an ancient Egyptian board game - was something I was always interested in doing, particularly given how often senet pops up if you do any basic research into the lives of ancient Egyptians or their mythology.
(A senet/znt board from Abydos ca. 1550-1295 B.C.E. (the other side appears to have had the game of twenty on it) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544775)
(Image credit: Wikihow)
According to some versions of the myth, Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, was either jealous of Nut’s (goddess of the sky) love of Geb (god of the Earth), or knew of a prophecy whereby her offspring would unseat Ra from the throne, and cursed her to be unable to give birth for the whole year. On Nut’s behalf, Thoth, the god of wisdom, played senet against Khonsu, god of the moon, for enough moonlight to add five extra unofficial days to the year (bringing it to 365 days), wherein Nut could give birth.
The giant game of “Senet” in TR4′s Tomb of Semerkhet always fascinated me, because not only was it apparently “senet” in some form, but it also just looked neat (for the time, TR4′s graphics looked really cool). By the time I was able to play it myself, though, I’d come to accept that it wasn’t actually senet, because the configuration was wrong (most senet games have 30 cells in 3 lanes of 10, whereas “Senet” in TR4 has 20 cells and is arranged like a lollipop or hammer).
Fast forward to recently when I finally looked into getting a senet board to play with my family, and I discovered another ancient Egyptian board game called Mehen, supposedly based on the Egyptian snake god of the same name, who was known to wrap his coils around Ra for protection every night on the sun boat as Ra journeyed across the sky.
(Image credit: a Mehen board from Abydos, Egypt, ca 3000 BCE, the Neues Museum)
During that search, I randomly came across boards for the TR4 game I thought the TR4 devs made up! But rather than being a recreation of a fictional board game, as a number of gaming enthusiasts are apt to do, this one is real. It was called Aseb, which is a name you come across for the game of twenty in a number of places, and is a little more accepted than the alternate but also relatively popular name, Tjau. Most of the academics I’ve seen don’t use either “Aseb” or “Tjau”, though. They call it the game of twenty or Twenty Squares.
(A Twenty Squares board from Thebes, Egypt. ca. 1635–1458 B.C.E https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/twenty-squares)
So what happened here? TR4 actually calls it “Senet”, so clearly the naming choice was intentional on some level. Here's a picture of the in-game item in the Tomb of Semerkhet level to learn the rules for the board game (you can see a preview of the board itself on the bottom right) (also I believe this is from the console version):
The name of the item in your inventory telling you what the game you're going to be playing is called:
(Screencap from “Tomb Raider 4 - Tomb of Semerkhet Walkthrough” by Roli's Tomb Raider Channel: https://youtu.be/RhAbD7EsC8A?t=512)
After the game of twenty was introduced to Egypt, it was often added to the back of senet game boards (two games in one). I’ve reviewed interviews from before and after TR4 was released, various retrospectives and documentaries, and found nothing on who made this level or why the game was misnamed, assuming anyone involved even knew it was misnamed. I imagine the TR4 devs found one or more of these double-sided boards during game development: a labeled senet board with the game of twenty on the back, and they then assumed it was the same game in two variants. My assumption is that someone wanted senet because it’s a relatively well-known cultural artifact from Egypt that people would at least have name recognition for, but the game of twenty was picked instead of senet because it’s shorter and less complicated. Plus, senet is considered to be a metaphorical journey through the Egyptian afterlife, which is suitable for a tomb (and a game involving bringing a dead god back to life), and many of the surviving boards we have were found in tombs.
Maybe the devs even read some article somewhere that misattributed it. Surviving board games have been misattributed over the years and anything is possible. Also, this was 1998 and it's easier to download an epub of "Board Games Across Borders" in 2022 than whatever they did.
Notably the team did research at the British Museum (https://youtu.be/aTL88Z4db9k?t=4560), which has at least one senet board on display. It also has a game of twenty board, which was possibly in South Carolina or being transported when the team was researching (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA24424)
The team also bought books for research, though I'm not sure what, other than some of the works of John-Yves Empereur (https://youtu.be/aTL88Z4db9k?t=6414). There was also apparently a US team (Core Design was British), but I'm not sure where they went for research.
I've seen a few websites call the game of twenty in TR4 a "variant" of senet (likely because it's called "Senet" in TR4, but doesn't look like senet). It's not. Senet is Egyptian (though the origin is murky pre-First Dynasty). The game of twenty possibly came from the Indus Valley and shows up in Egyptian artifacts around the 17th Dynasty. The game of twenty is supposedly a variation of the Royal Game of Ur (from Sumer). The Royal Game of Ur was played all around the region.
(https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1928-1009-378)
For the game of twenty, four of the cells on the right were folded back into a longer tail. I haven’t found any historian or archaeologist who says that senet or the game of twenty was involved in the other’s creation, outside them both appearing on the same game boards, back to back. For all intents and purposes, senet was present in Egypt for some time before the game of twenty arrived, and then both games were popular there simultaneously.
I can’t find any fansite, forum, speedrunner, or playthrough that references the fact that the giant board game in TR4 isn’t actually senet. Even Stella’s Walkthroughs references it as a variant of senet, and links to Senet’s wikipedia page, which does actually have a game of twenty board on it (though they call it Tjau), and the Met’s page on senet, which also references the game of twenty. Tomb Raider Horizons mentions the game and shows screencaps, but talks about senet, not the game of twenty. And all the fanwikis I’ve found refer to it as senet, not the game of twenty or any of its other name variants.
For all intents and purposes, I guess no one noticed this in 23+ years, or was invested enough to go down a rabbit hole for it. But it’s neat to learn it was real.
Unrelatedly, there appears to be a sort of senet board in "Tomb Raider" (1996). There are ~15 more cells than most senet games and 2 extra lanes, but it's interesting that the team seems to have sort of done it right just a couple years beforehand.
(Screenshot from "Was it Good? - Tomb Raider 1" by Josh Strife Plays: https://youtu.be/dwzIu4zFJVI)
It's possible the TR1 game is forty-two and pool, which is supposed to be similar to senet, and has 42 holes, though the number of rows is wrong, and I don't have a picture of the board for comparison.
It's also possible this is some version of "Hounds and Jackals", which often has 58 holes (notably the one above has 45 cells), but the TR1 board looks more like senet's does and the pieces are missing, so who knows? (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/543867)
Misnaming aside, shout out to this translation of the casting sticks in a video game not built to play board games and using 1998-9 tech.
(Screencap from “Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation - 13b - Winning at Senet” by ladycroft214: https://youtu.be/1JV2oIXmVMg)
You can also play versions of all these games, online or physically. We don’t know the rules for all of them, and rules changed over the centuries anyway, but many people have come up with their own rules based on what we know, so there are versions online, and plenty of board game makers who have designed them for you to purchase, or even draw yourself on paper, like the ancients used to graffiti on roads and walls.