Hah! That’s a beautiful parallel to the twenty squares game which was incredibly popular in the ancient Middle East. Of course no-one would write down the rules, everyone knew them already! The reason we have the rules now is because the wonderful Irving Finkel deciphered them from a cuneiform tablet, that described a more complex gambling game that could be played as an addition to the humdrum version.
What if international chess had only survived as a side note in an essay on the Capablanca variant?!