I’ve always been very interested in ancient Rome. I’m so happy that today, for the first time in my life, I was able to get a glimpse of it.
Ancient Roman Board Game
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Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#42This game is included in Nintendo's Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics on Switch (known in Europe as 51 Worldwide Games)
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#43Another 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!
> A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu. This is much more palatable and cool since they’re not just randomly guessing what the game can be like this article is
It's far from random. Reconstructing it with game playing AIs is a bit excessive maybe, but blocking games (hare games) are a style of game which are very widely historically attested.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#44Reminds me of the mystery of the Roman dodecahedrons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron I was thinking of them yesterday because I noticed one for sale in the antiquities shop in Andor, which brought up all sorts of Earth/Rome/Star Wars cannon questions.
The best explanation anyone has come up with for those dodecahedrons was as tools for making jewelry from gold wire. Here's a video by an expert knitter named Amy Gaines in which she demonstrates the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADTLozKm0I
The segment where she uses a replica dodecahedron to make a chain from aluminum wire (stiffer than gold, meaning this would have been easier with actual gold) is entirely convincing. It explains everything about the shape of the objects, both the protruding knobs on the end and also the fact that the holes are of different sizes.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#45> 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 seems impossible. If you started with chess pieces and a chessboard or even a go board and go pieces, it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct the game as they’re currently played.
Whichis is fair and good, bc nobody would expect you to rebuild the actual rules of chess from the board alone.
However it would still be useful if archeologists used the board to figure out some games similar to checkers, or go; or if they also have the pieces they could guess it was a combat game like Shogi. Any of those would give you insight about the kinds of leisure that people may get from that board.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#46> 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…
The thing missing here is that nearly all of the games that use these nodes + stones are a variant on Nine Men's Morris (or Twelve Men's Morris, or etc). Discovering the ruleset for a particular variant is kind of like discovering a new version of "Uno" based on uncovering new house rules.
Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#47> 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.”
True, this is the best we can get and archaeology is full of speculation.
It is still a very, very reasonable speculation, probably 95% accurate.
You can thank the ones who burned the Biblioteca of Alexandria for most of the loss of actual information.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#48Now I want a playable version of this game in tabletop simulator :)
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
Archaeology is an unusual discipline in that it incorporates so many others as tools. Chemistry, physics, geology, CPSC, you name it. It's difficult enough to figure out what people were doing based on ruins and trash pits. It's harder still when there are so many disciplines involved that, each, introduce their own uncertainties. That being said, "We asked an AI..." is a special kind of uncertainty that goes above a…
There's a huge difference between "asking and AI" meaning a prompt to a LLM, and very particular simulation fine tuned to this problem where the evaluation criteria is matching the exact wear found in the real boards.
This work is much closer to a numerical simulation than anything you can call AI.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#50Neat, but this game seems too simple. I think AI has missed a core gameplay mechanic. There needs to be something to stop a deadlock. Like an element of luck for the hares?
Think of this as a very old game, with a board simple enough you can trace it on the ground and play with a few stones, with rules simple enough you can explain/understand in 30 seconds. Like tic-tac-toe, mancala, nim, chopsticks... simplicity and portability wins over perfect rules or balance.