Board games — senterej and gäbäṭa — in a painted Ethiopian manuscript. British Library Ethiopian collections. Digitally restored/upscaled from the original source.

Play Senterej

Choose an opponent and take your place at the board.Choose your court

Illustration titled Ethiopian Chess — ስንጠረዥ, Senterej: a bearded man in a dark cape and a woman in a white shawl reach across a red senterej board set with pale turned pieces, a flask and a bowl of beans beside it.

Two ways to play

Take your place at the board

Face a historical opponent or invite another reader to a private court. Both modes use the same rules, pieces, and opening phase.

Five historical opponents
Private multiplayer by invitation
Touch and keyboard controls

Play a historical opponentChoose a ruler and difficulty Invite another readerOpen a private multiplayer court

Four men seated on the ground around a ruled cloth board of turned playing pieces inside a tent, in an early twentieth-century photograph, colourised. — Santaraj, traditional Ethiopian chess, early twentieth century. Players identified in Pankhurst & Gérard, *Ethiopia Photographed* (1996), plate 246, after De Castro (1915). Digitally restored, upscaled and colourised from the original black-and-white source.

The game, photographed

Santaraj reached the camera while it was still being played at court. This photograph was taken in Ethiopia between 1901 and 1911, and Pankhurst and Gérard credit it to Lincoln de Castro’s Nella terra dei Negus, published in Milan in 1915.

See it at the head of the game

The sources for the rules

The rules follow Walter Plowden’s nineteenth-century account as preserved by H. J. R. Murray, alongside Richard Pankhurst’s study. The one screen-specific adaptation to Werera is labelled where it appears.

Murray, 1913 Pankhurst, 1971 British Museum pieces 17th-century board