Tâb

Tâb is the Egyptian name of a running-fight board game played in several Arab countries, or a family of similar board games played in Northern Africa and South-western Asia, from Persia to West Africa and from Turkey to Somalia, where a variant called deleb is played. The game described here was recorded by Edward William Lane in Egypt in the 1820s. A reference to "at-tâb wa-d-dukk" (likely a similar game) occurs in a poem of 1310 CE.

The tâb game is played by two players on a board, often delineated at the ground. The board is 4 squares wide, and usually an odd number of squares long, usually from 7 to 15, but formerly up to 29 squares. Numbering the four rows 1, 2, 3 and 4, from the start one player has one (nominally) white piece in each field of row 1, and the other a (nominally) black piece in each field of row 4. The pieces may be stones or made from burnt clay. In Egypt, the pieces are referred to as kelb, meaning dog.

As in the Egyptian game senet and the Korean game Yut, four sticks of a roughly semi-circular cross-section are used as dice. The flat sides are (nominally) white, and the rounded sides are (nominally) black. The value of a throw depends on the number of black and white sides showing, as indicated in the following table.