The study of gameboards in ancient West Asia has been revitalized by approaches foregrounding
the social connections and new interactive spaces created by games such as Senet, Twenty-Squares, and
Fifty-Eight-Holes. Often played between two people, these games can help explore the intimate rituals
of social bonding and negotiation, particularly in diverse communities in which boundaries of class,
gender, language, and geographic origins are continuously set, negotiated, and broken. Taking games as
social lubricants (Crist, de Voogt and Dunn-Vaturi 2016) this paper will consider their role specifically
within the diverse communities of the kārum network in Anatolia, where all extant boards are variants of
the Game of Fifty-Eight-Holes. Egyptian in origin and prolific throughout ancient West Asia, the presence
of boards used for Fifty-Eight-Holes at settlements within the kārum network is clearly associated with
foreign presence. Integral to mercantile modes of being, gameboards represent a special category of
material culture that carried a specific set of meanings and affordances and can therefore illuminate
previously unconsidered dimensions of the encounters between Anatolians and Assyrians
