The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata, and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka.

It was eventually forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it called 'Asha' until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel.

A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.

Based on this tablet and the shape of the gameboard, Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, reconstructed the basic rules of how the game might have been played.

The Game of Ur was popular across the Middle East[4][6] and boards for it have been found in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus and Crete.

[4][6][7] Four gameboards bearing a very close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

[4] A graffito version of the game carved with a sharp object, possibly a dagger, was discovered on one of the human-headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II (721–705 BC) in the city of Khorsabad.

[4][5] The Game of Ur eventually acquired superstitious significance[4][9] and the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balāṭu provides vague predictions for the players' futures if they land on certain spaces,[4][9] such as "You will find a friend", "You will become powerful like a lion", or "You will draw fine beer".

[4][9] Seemingly random events, such as landing on a certain square, were interpreted as messages from deities, ghosts of deceased ancestors, or from a person's own soul.

[4][9] At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was apparently introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants.

[4][9] Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur, which they called Aasha,[3] by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II.

[6][8][9][12] Then, in the early 1980s, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, translated a clay tablet written c. 177 BC by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu describing how the game was played during that time period, based on an earlier description of the rules by another scribe named Iddin-Bēl.

[9][12] This tablet was written during the waning days of Babylonian civilization,[9] long after the time when the Game of Ur was first played.

[12] Finkel also used photographs of another tablet describing the rules, which had been in the personal collection of Count Aymar de Liedekerke-Beaufort, but was destroyed during World War I.

[6][8] The number of marked ends facing upwards after a roll of the dice indicates how many spaces a player may move during that turn.

One archaeological dig uncovered twenty-one white balls alongside a set of the Game of Ur.