This reminds me of bear games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_games
Here's a tablebase analysis for a simple bear game I constructed a while back: https://emarzion.github.io/coqtbgen/
Ancient Roman Board Game
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#32The rules seem like a rather boring pre-decessor to the mills game/nine men's morris. I guess this is what I would draw inspiration from though, to make the game more interesting, because the board is actually kind of neat.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#33Another ancient board game to be decoded is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur . This is from 2600BC so is older to Christ than Christ is to us. The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!
There's an online version to play that I find surprisingly addictive:
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#34Since the rules are entirely reconstructed, I have to say I'm a bit skeptical of a game where a central point is keeping a count of moves up to 150. It seems too unpractical for a casual game.
Are there other known ancient games that work like this?
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#35Too assymetric IMO. I have no problems winning with hounds even on hard, but I have no chance of winning except against easy.
I won second try with hares on medium, I think the trick is to:
A) make sure you get at least one hare to one of the central two spots (will always be possible) and camp it there. Keep your other hare moving around on your side.
B) the opponent will have to bring two hounds over to catch your other hare. To do this they will have to create a gap between the first and second hound in the middle spot above/below your camped hare. As soon as this happens, move your camped hare upwards.
It's pretty easy after that TBH. The AI has usual burnt a load of moves by that point and you have so many options from that position
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#36Somewhat similar to Tafl games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
Similar in that it is asymmetrical, very old, and we don't quite know what the rules were (though with tafl we have slightly better historical evidence, including an account from Carl Linnaeus in 1732, which has allowed us to produce a few educated guesses). In fact tafl is sometimes speculated to derive from the Roman game of ludus latrunculorum - I'm not sure if that is the same game described here.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#37> No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025). > Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class…
This feels like the thing that makes me deeply skeptical of swaths of archaeology and palaeontology as a science rather than being a kind of fandom. I imagine the incentives of having a crisp story for media consumption don’t help. I’d hope to read a lot more: “we’re missing the majority of the pieces to this puzzle. This represents our best guess given current evidence and methods.”
What about reading the paper before you proclaim all archeology rotten over the wording in a wikipedia article?
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#38Another ancient board game to be decoded is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur . This is from 2600BC so is older to Christ than Christ is to us. The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!
There's an online version to play that I find surprisingly addictive: https://royalur.net/
Thank you. I had never played it, surprisingly fun. Much like Ludo but actually better.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#39It should be "novus ludus" not "nova ludus". (now go and write 100 times...)
Glad I'm not the only one
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#40Nice game, had fun playing it with my friend