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A painted manuscript page on a yellow ground: two robed men play senterej at a chequered board on an arcaded table, another holds out a gäbäṭa board of cups, and below them seated figures point and argue over smaller boards.
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 documented rules, court pieces, and opening phase.

  • Five historical opponents
  • Private multiplayer by invitation
  • Touch and keyboard controls
Play a historical opponentChoose a ruler and difficultyInvite 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

A documented game, carefully adapted

The rules follow Walter Plowden’s nineteenth-century account as preserved by H. J. R. Murray, alongside Richard Pankhurst’s study. The game labels the one screen-specific adaptation to Werera rather than presenting it as historical fact.