Wizards also had Wizard's Chess. Aside from the pieces moving on their own and captured pieces being knocked over and destroyed, its rules were actually much the same as ordinary chess. Each side had sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns.
Though this way of playing was rather violent, Wizard's Chess still represented the world of the living, completely unlike Senet, which depicted the underworld path that ferried the dead across.
On a Senet board, the squares were not called "squares," but houses. Apart from the House of Water on the twenty-seventh square, which contained the Waters of Chaos, there were four other particularly special squares.
First was the House of Rebirth on the fifteenth square. This square bore an Egyptian symbol representing life, one that could be seen in many accessory shops and souvenir stores at the British Museum, made from all kinds of materials. It was far from the House of Beauty on the twenty-sixth square.
Ordinary people would not make that move unless they had no other pieces they could move. Senet pieces could only advance, never retreat. As long as even one piece could move, a turn could not be skipped. At that point, no matter how unwilling one was, one could only step into the Waters of Chaos and start over.
The twenty-sixth square was called the House of Beauty, but it actually had nothing to do with beautiful men or women. It represented mummification. In funerary murals, jackal-headed Anubis often appeared upon the full moon, as though he had possessed it just as he possessed the dead.
Many Egyptian gods were associated with the moon, including Osiris. He had been cut into fourteen pieces, linking him to the waxing and waning of the moon, so the