Is it a game?

[Numbers Junkie]

Is the whole just a game? Or is the game a metaphor for something much much bigger?
Are we watching a loop? A straight line? Alternatives? What ifs?

[Jungle Otter]

Regarding games - my wife caught this, how I missed it who knows. In the preview for next week, there are two people playing a board game with sticks. Most likely the game Senet (which I have and have played on many occasions).
Each player has five pieces which they move according to the throw of the sticks. The object is to be the first person to get their pieces off the board. (Intersting metaphor for the island)

[BobBX542]

Well, going by what Jungle Otter said, I looked up Senet, and I can not and will not say that is what Jacob and MiB are playing, but it deffinitely does seem to make sense as to the what is going on with the survivors.

[Adriana]

So I didn't actually see this take place in this episode.  Did I just miss it?

[Chuckie]

Now having watched the episode, and looked it up, I am sure the game is Senet. It's interesting to note that no one knows the original rules to the game. So the idea that BiB (boy in black) was making up the rules is pretty interesting.

[lostlady]

I was really expecting that this episode would explain how the game gets started and what the rules are.

[RM]

Yeah, it's definitely the Egyptian game SENET (possibly the oldest board game ever known).

The actual rules have been lost in antiquity, but current scholarship thinks it eventually developed into having religious overtones where the player negotiated his way through the underworld with "victory" meaning that he received eternal life.

See these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet

http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/Archives/Piccione/index.html

Some interesting passages:

"... new translations and interpretations of religious gaming texts [...] describe the journey of the soul through various regions of the afterlife as if it were moving across a senet board. The Egyptians believed that in death they would join the sun god on his bark as it set in the western horizon at dusk. The deceased and the sun god would then journey together through the subterranean regions of the underworld. Here dwelt a host of divinities and the souls of deceased people who were judged for their sins and consequently rewarded or punished. The reward would be food, drink and eternal life with Ra, the sun god; the punishment, torture and eventual annihilation. "

"Square 27 depicted the "Waters of Chaos" over which the netherworld bark floated as it rose into heaven at dawn. Sinners, denied a place in the bark, were drowned in these waters; thus, as the words of one gaming text aptly showed, square 27 was the ultimate senet pitfall: "I seize his gamepieces so that he might drown together with his gamepieces. I throw him into the water." Draughtsmen who landed on it had to be removed from the board. "