Senet was a game for two, like chess, played on a board with three rows of ten spaces or ‘houses’ in each.  The game pieces were called ibau  (dancers). There were usually seven pieces to each player, though the number could vary from five to ten.  The rules of the game are not known in detail, but the aim seems to have been to get all one’s pieces ‘home’ or off the board.  Sometimes the last five squares were decorated with images and even words.

'Twenty Squares' appears to have been a game of Babylonian origin, which, although very popular, did not gather the symbolic associations of senet, which seems, like chess, to have had connotations of life and death.