This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Egyptologists know the Senet board with confidence: thirty squares in three rows of ten, several of them marked with symbols that clearly meant something to the players. What nobody has recovered is a text explaining what those symbols meant in play, how many pieces each side moved, what determined a legal move, or how captures worked, because the ancient Egyptians never wrote a rulebook down, or if they did, it has not survived.
Egyptologist Timothy Kendall built one of the most widely used modern reconstructions by working backward from the marked squares, tomb depictions of mid game positions, and comparison with the somewhat better documented rules of the related game Twenty Squares from Mesopotamia. It plays well and is not obviously wrong, but it remains an inference rather than a recovered original. Anyone who plays Kendall's reconstruction today is playing a modern best guess at a three thousand year old game, not the game itself as its first players understood it.