AI Figured Out the Rules of a Lost Roman Board Game — And Now You Can Play It
Researchers used artificial intelligence to reverse-engineer the rules of an ancient Roman board game carved into a small limestone slab found in the Netherlands, and the game is now playable online.
KEY FACTS:
- A limestone board roughly 20 centimeters across was found in Heerlen, a Dutch city built atop the Roman-era town of Coriovallum, but no historical records explained what game it represented or how it was played.
- Leiden University archaeologist Walter Crist and colleagues fed an AI system more than 100 possible rule sets, letting it play thousands of simulated games, then compared results to wear patterns carved into the stone.
- The AI identified the game as a blocking strategy game: one player places four pieces, the opponent places two, and the goal is to avoid being blocked for as long as possible.
- The reconstructed game, named Ludus Coriovalli, is now playable online through the Ludii platform.
How the AI Solved It
The research team used Ludii, an AI-driven game system designed to simulate play across a wide range of board games. Two virtual players competed under various configurations — different numbers of pieces, different movement rules — while the system tracked which setups produced wear patterns matching those on the actual board.
“We tried many different kinds of combinations: three versus two pieces, or four versus two, or two against two … we wanted to test out which ones replicated the wear on the board,” Crist says, per Science News.
The findings were published in the February issue of Antiquity.
The Game That Emerged
The AI simulations pointed to a specific answer. The game likely involved one player placing four pieces in the board’s grooves while an opponent placed two. It’s a blocking game — strategy centers on restricting your opponent’s movement rather than capturing their pieces.
The research team named it Ludus Coriovalli, the “Coriovallum Game.” A game lost for centuries, with no written rules, no oral tradition, no surviving players, has been reconstructed well enough to function as a playable digital experience.
Why Experts Say This Is Groundbreaking
Véronique Dasen, an archaeologist at the University of Fribourg who was not involved in the study, called the research “groundbreaking.”
Her reasoning went beyond the single game. She pointed to a much larger implication: scratched markings on Roman-era stones previously dismissed or cataloged as decorative doodling might actually be game boards.
“The research results invite [archaeologists] to reconsider the identification of Roman period graffiti that could be actual boards for a similar game not present in texts,” she says, according to Science News.
Dasen also noted that before this research, there had been no evidence that Romans knew of this type of blocking game. “Games can go on for centuries, and sometimes they appear and then disappear,” she says.
What AI Can and Can’t Do Here
The tension between what AI can reconstruct from physical evidence and what still requires traditional archaeological detective work defines where this method sits right now.
The AI excels at brute-force testing of rule sets and matching simulated outcomes to physical wear. It can’t tell you who gathered around the board, what was at stake, or whether the game carried any social or ritual meaning.
The board’s archaeological context was unknown — researchers couldn’t even pin down exactly when or how it ended up where it did.
Two Developments Worth Watching
The Ludus Coriovalli project sits at the intersection of two trends. The first is AI being applied to reconstruction problems — cases where the original instructions, context, or meaning of an artifact has been lost. The approach of simulating thousands of possibilities and comparing results to physical evidence is transferable to other domains where partial physical evidence exists but documentation doesn’t.
The second is the growing effort to make rediscovered ancient games playable again. The research didn’t stop at publication. It produced something people can actually engage with.
How to Try It Yourself
The game is playable online through the Ludii platform, which hosts a range of historical and reconstructed board games. If you’re drawn to strategy games built around blocking rather than capture, Ludus Coriovalli fits: four pieces against two, with the winner being whoever avoids getting stuck the longest.
The full research paper is available through Antiquity, and the Locus Ludi project offers broader context on ancient Roman and Greek board games and other forms of play.
BOTTOM LINE: This method — using AI to test hundreds of rule sets against physical wear on ancient artifacts — could unlock the rules of other lost games currently misidentified as simple graffiti on Roman-era stones.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
