A fairly simple race game it may be, but the Royal Game of Ur is the oldest board game that there is evidence of, dug up by Leonard Woolley in the 1930s in the City of Ur in what is now modern Iraq.
The excavated board game, now in the British Museum, has an extraordinary level of detail and geometric perfection to it considering it was designed some 2000 years before any true mathematical precedents as recognised today.
Of course, the specific rules are only mostly known, but the sophistication suggests that some work at least went into the designing the game. The Royal Game of Ur may very well itself be an iteration of an even earlier game, and again this is so far the only one we have evidence of from the time, so there may have been another iteration after what we have discovered which didn't survive the test of time or is still waiting to be discovered.
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