Rules of mysterious ancient Roman board game decoded by AI
February 10, 2026
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Rules of a mysterious ancient Roman board game decoded by AI
A Roman stone board game has been unplayable since its discovery more than a century ago, but AI may have just defined the rules.
The possible game board with pencil lines highlighting the incised lines.
It was the summer of 2020, and researcher Walter Crist was wandering among the exhibits at a Dutch museum dedicated to the presence of the ancient Roman Empire in the Netherlands. As a scientist studying ancient board games, Crist was struck by one exhibit: a stone game board dating to the end of the Roman Empire. It measured about eight inches in diameter and was engraved with angular lines that roughly formed the shape of an oblong octagon inside a rectangle.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ because the pattern on it is not something I’ve ever seen in literature before,” Crist says.
The name of the game and how it was played were also a mystery.
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Crist contacted museum curators to take a closer look. And now he and his colleagues believe they’ve decoded the game in a first-of-its-kind study using a combination of more traditional archaeological methods and artificial intelligence. According to the analysis, the object appears as a kind of “blocking game”. In this type of game, one player tries to stop another from moving; an example is tic-tac-toe.
The research was published Monday in the journal Antiquity.
Crist, now a visiting professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, remembers that when he and his team began investigating the board game, they didn’t have many details to work with. They knew that the game board had been discovered in the late 1800s or early 1900s in the town of Heerlen in the southeastern Netherlands, which is believed to have been the town of Coriovallum in Roman times. The board was made of limestone imported from France. And the game was probably played casually and may not have been particularly notable, in part because there is no known documentation of it in written texts of the time.
Excavations of two pottery kilns in Heerlen, 1940.
To decipher the rules, Crist’s team programmed two AI agents to play the game over and over again using more than 100 different sets of rules taken from other well-known European games, ancient and modern. As the AI agents played (1,000 games per set of rules), the researchers tracked the movement of the pieces. Then they compared the movements with the wear levels of areas of the board, tracing gameplay that seemed to replicate the grooves in the stone.
The team found nine sets of rules that seemed “consistent” with the board’s wear. “And they were all variations of that same type of blocking play,” Crist says.
This type of game was played in the 19th and 20th centuries in Scandinavia, and researchers believed it dates back to the early Middle Ages. But the Roman game is the first example of such a game in Europe, Crist says. He and his team decided the game Ludus Coriovalli, Latin for “the game of Coriovallum”. (You can play it online here.)
AI simulation results showing nine possible game boards. In these games, the player with more pieces attempts to block the player with fewer pieces.
Crist hopes the study will help researchers solve other ancient board games. Such games offer a way to connect the ancient past to our own lives, he says. Indeed, they have not changed much over the centuries. The ancient Egyptian board game Senet, for example, may not have been so different from Sorry! Chess, on the other hand, is believed to have originated in ancient India, and no one really knows when or where backgammon originated.
Understanding how ancient games could be played, Crist says, “can lead us to new perspectives on how people in the past enjoyed their lives.”
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