Ever more steeped in Mongolian culture

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As it develops, our game Ulus is becoming ever more steeped in the traditional Mongolian culture we’re trying to bring to the world, and hoping to protect.

Perfect example: by now you’ve probably heard that instead of dice we’re using shagai, the anklebones of sheep used for divination and for children’s games all across Asia.

Well, our resident genius Jovan Ellis has gone even farther. In the game, you roll the shagai not just to move ahead but to have them divine where you will move. And then when players reach the final showdown at the annual festival of Naadam, he has worked out a way to represent the three traditional Mongol sports–wrestling, horse racing, and archery–by adapting traditional children’s shagai games. In other words, in playing our game you’ll be playing games that kids have been playing for centuries, kneeling on grass, sand, or dirt, flicking them like marbles or scooping them up like jacks.

Shagai. Each of the four faces has its own shape, and its own name: Sheep, Goat, Horse, and Camel.

This is what I always wanted: a game that would take the Western player out of the West and, even in this COVID era, set them down in Central Asia to discover why this amazing culture, with its language and beautiful script, needs to be known and saved.

Read about the game, its characters, its mythology, its rules, at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/ulus-legends-of-the-nomads/.

And then please support us at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/ulus-a-game-to-save-a-culture.