this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I played it a bit, too. It's interesting, and it does need some strategy, that's cool.

I'll drop a numbered layout for easy reference when talking about strategy:

In the initial position (A), the cone gets in your way. Move it ASAP to G, so it gets in your opponent's way too. It isn't terribly useful to capture opponent pieces.

Accordingly the wall should be moved to E or F. It's a bit better than the cone for captures, but ideally you should still capture your opponent pawns with your own (as this allows you to push them forward too).

When possible, hit the safe spaces (H, L, P). Not just for the safety of your piece, but because you'll have an additional roll. H and L in special are useful to capture advanced opponent pawns.

At least this ruleset it's typically better to advance multiple pieces at the same time than just one. That's because this ruleset includes some Zugzwang-like rule (if you can move, then you must move), that sometimes forces you into disadvantageous moves (like retracting the cone from G to A, letting your opponent put their cone there, and now you got two pieces of junk in the middle of the way.)

The game of Ur uses three pyramids to decide your roll, while this one uses a four-sided stick. This has gameplay impact because the probability of each roll is different:

Roll odds (Ur) odds (Shahr-i Sokhta)
1 3/8 2/8
2 3/8 2/8
3 1/8 2/8
4 1/8 2/8

So don't rely on your opponent not rolling a 4; they will. And accordingly, if you're "stuck" with a pawn in the square P, and there's no nearby opponent pawn, just move it out of the board ASAP.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Nice! It's actually introducing suggested rules with a basic minimal strategy. I'm sure that, like the Royal Game of Ur, we will see different variations of the rules for this in the future. This will serve as a base. They also mentioned about it in their paper.