Egyptian siege - a board game in Egypt

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1986 by Philip Stewart

EGYPTIAN SIEGE

THINK OF A BOARD GAME, and you will probably see images of yourself cooped up indoors on a wet day or a long winter evening, or perhaps sitting in a great hall taking part in a chess tournament. Nothing could be further from being out of doors feeling the wind or the sun's warmth, looking at soil and rocks and plants. Well, let me share with you the secret of seega or Egyptian siege, a board game that fits so well into its outdoor setting that it seems almost a part of nature.

Siege combines the simplicity of checkers with the infinite variety of chess or go, the slowly unfolding geometry of go with the rapid cut and thrust of chess or checkers. In addition, it has an aesthetic appeal all its own. But if Siege is so good, why have so few people heard of it?

I first met the word "seega' in an Egyptian novel I was translating. My dictionary gave no help, so I asked my Cairo friends. They were learned people--university teachers and students, lawyers and doctors--but most of them did not even know the game. One friend, though, was able to tell me that it was "a childish game, played by peasants, not interesting at all.' I felt uneasy, but got no further.

Having finished my translation, I left the noise of Cairo for a holiday in Uper Egypt. Staying in a village near Luxor, I at last found men playing seeja (the Upper Egyptian pronunciation, from which I have called it "siege' in English). I understood at once why my Cairo friends despised the game: they were too grand to sit down in the dust and move pebbles around. Worse still, if they had stooped to playing, they would have been soundly beaten; these villagers were highly skilled. They trounced me every time I tried my hand. I soon came to realize that this game was as difficult as chess. The "simple peasants' had mastered something as intellectually demanding as anything in the university curriculum of my Cairo friends.

The game is played on a board of 25 stations, five by five. On sand or soft earth the stations are little hollows, pressed with the knuckles. On hard ground, they are the intersections of two sets of five lines, scratched at right angles. On a surface too hard or rough to mark, they are the squares formed by two sets of six twigs or grass stems, laid at right angles. Each player has twelve pieces. These can be of any two contrasting materials: lumps of grey and red schist, knobs of flint and limestone, water-worn pebbles of different colours . . . it could, for that matter, be played with fruits or nuts, bones or shells, even snowballs and icicles. Part of the beauty of the game is its reflection of the physical scene.

The game takes place in two phases. First, the players take turns setting out their pieces, two at a time, till all the stations except the central one are filled. In the second phase, the players take turns moving their pieces, starting with the player who set his pieces down last. (As each player has the first turn in one phase of the game, neither has the heavy advantage of the white pieces in chess.) A move consists of moving a piece to an adjacent square, horizontally or vertically (not diagonally). Pieces may move backward as well as forward, so the board does not have two ends as in chess and checkers. If a player is unable to move when it is his or her turn, the game ends in stalemate.

The object is to take as many of the opponent's pieces as possible, and the game is won when one player succeeds in reducing the other to only one piece. Taking --which is optional, not obligatory --is effected by moving one of your pieces so that a single enemy piece is caught between it and another piece of yours (horizontally or vertically, not diagonally); the enemy piece is then removed from the board. Two or three pieces, on two or three sides of the station you move to, can be taken simultaneously with one move. If the piece that has just taken can take again, it is allowed, but not obliged, to do so straight away, before the opponent's turn, making as many moves as there are successive takes to be made. (Pieces that are caught between two enemy pieces during the setting out are not thereby taken.)

These are all the rules of siege, and they can be learned in a few minutes. But the simplicity is deceptive. There are hundreds of thousands of viable starting positions (not leading to immediate stalemate), after allowance has been made for those that are rotations or mirror images of each other, as opposed to only one starting position in chess or checkers. Out of each starting position the branching tree of alternative moves grows very rapidly as captures increase the number of empty spaces into which moves can be made. The number of possible games must far exceed the number that have ever been played.

As in chess, the experienced player visualises the board and his position as a whole, judging it by certain broad features. In one way this is even harder in siege than in chess, since the board does not have a black end and a white end, a king's side and a queen's side. Position must be recognized from any angle. Great variety exists in the extent to which each army is gathered together or divided, and in the shapes of the groups of pieces and in the gaps between them. There are closed games in which two armies press on each other, trying to force losing moves, and open games with rapid change over a wide front. Surprises come the moment attention lapses-- not least the surprise of sudden stalemate just when one player seems poised to overwhelm.