Is this carved stone an ancient Roman board game?

Perhaps a game board with a pencil highlighting the engraved lines

Het Romeins Museum

A mysterious flat stone with a geometric pattern of straight lines may be a previously unknown Roman board game.

Thousands of artificial intelligence simulations of how sliding stones or pieces of glass might have marked the surface suggest that this was an early example of a blocking game, of the type not documented in Europe until several centuries later in the Middle Ages.

Writings and physical remains have revealed that the Romans played many board games. They include Ludus latrunculorumor a soldier game where the goal is to capture the other player’s pieces; Ludus duodecim scriptorumwhich means the game of 12 signs and is often considered the ancestor of backgammon; and games like tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses, where you win by placing three symbols in a row on a grid.

However, there are probably many games that we do not know about because nothing has been written about them, no traces have survived, or we simply do not recognize them.

IN Roman Museum in Heerlen, the Netherlands, Walter Crist at Leiden University, also in the Netherlands, came across a flat stone measuring 212 x 145 millimeters with a geometric pattern carved on the top. It was found in the Roman city of Coriovallum, which is buried beneath present-day Heerlen, and the type of limestone it is made of was often imported from France for use in decorative features on buildings between 250 and 476.

“I was a little skeptical at first because it’s a pattern I hadn’t seen before, so I asked the museum to take a closer look,” says Crist. He then found visible wear on the object’s surface, consistent with pushing the stone figures along the carved lines.

However, the wear was uneven, mostly on one particular diagonal line.

To find out what might have led to this distinctive pattern, Crist and his colleagues used an AI gaming system known as Peoplewhich pitted two AI agents against each other. It simulated thousands of games with different numbers of starting pieces and 130 rule variations from various ancient board games played in Europe, including hartavl from Scandinavia and bear game from Italy.

Reconstruction of one of the main roads in the center of Coriovallum

Mikko Kriek/BCL Archaeological Support Amsterdam

The results revealed that nine similar blocking games, in which a person with multiple pieces tries to block the opponent’s movement, could have led to significant wear and tear, Crist says.

The team preliminarily calls the game Ludus Coriovallior a play by Coriovallum.

“I’m not convinced we can ever know for sure, but the analysis shows that this object could definitely be a game plan,” he says. Tim Penn at the University of Reading in Great Britain.

“It’s an interesting approach,” he says Ulrich Schädler at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. But he is not convinced that the object is a game board because the geometric pattern seems imprecise and this is the only known instance of this pattern where many versions of game boards are commonly found.

Crist admits we may never know, but says it could have been a prototype game or a game that was normally played using markers scratched into the ground, leaving no traces.

Block games in Europe have been documented since the Middle Ages, so if Ludus Coriovalli is a blocking game, it pushes the evidence back several centuries when people play these games there. They may have existed earlier in South and East Asia, Crist says, and there appear to be some block game-like patterns in Roman-era graffiti, but they are difficult to date.

A combination of archaeological and artificial intelligence methods like this could provide insights into other mysterious ancient games, Penn says. Another possible game board, from the Roman legionary camp at Vindonissa in Switzerland, features marks that look like a square with an X inside, with small holes where the lines join. “Maybe this kind of analysis could help shed new light on that,” says Penn.