Tessera: Ancient Games

New: Nine Men's Morris, with its South African cousin Morabaraba. The Royal Game of Ur is free; one purchase unlocks every other game, including those added later.

In Mesopotamia, someone pressed the rules of a board game into a clay tablet, in cuneiform. Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist at the British Museum, read that tablet in the 1980s and worked out how the game must have gone.

This app is a collection of games like that one.

Right now there are four: ancient Mesopotamia, Viking-age Scandinavia, West Africa three hundred years ago, and the Roman Empire through medieval Europe. More are on the way. The Mesopotamian game is free. One purchase unlocks the rest, and any game added later is included.

■ The Royal Game of Ur (Mesopotamia, around 2600 BCE) One of the oldest board games we know of. Race seven pieces to the end and you win. Leonard Woolley, a British archaeologist, dug the board out of the ground. Irving Finkel reconstructed the rules from two clay tablets found at Babylon and Uruk.

■ Hnefatafl (the Vikings, 8th to 11th century) An unusual game where the two sides don't have the same job: one player runs the king for a corner, the other tries to surround him. Chess pushed it out of use in the 12th century. Then in 1732 the botanist Carl Linnaeus found it still alive in the far north and copied the rules into his journal, under the name tablut. That one page is why we can still play it.

■ Oware (West Africa, the Ashanti Kingdom, about 300 years old) Take seeds from the pits, and the first to collect 25 wins. It started in the Ashanti kingdom about 300 years ago and is still played on the street in Ghana. Schools in West Africa and the Caribbean use it to teach arithmetic.

■ Nine Men's Morris (Roman Empire, from c. 3rd century) Line up three of your pieces to take one of your rival's. Boards survive cut into Roman tiles and stones, and in medieval Europe they were scratched into cloisters and church walls. The rules first appear in writing in 1283, in a book made for a Spanish king. You can also switch to its South African cousin, Morabaraba, still widely played today.

One phone is enough to play alone or with someone sitting across from you. If you'd rather have one each, connect two over Bluetooth. Every game comes with its own history section, and achievements to collect as you get better.