Roman Board Games and How They Played
Romans played games everywhere. Game boards scratched into the steps of the Colosseum, carved into the pavements of the Roman Forum, incised into the floors of military barracks from Hadrian’s Wall to the Syrian desert — the physical evidence for Roman gaming culture is distributed across every context where Romans spent time waiting, resting, or socializing. The games themselves ranged from dice games requiring no equipment beyond three cubes of bone or ivory to board games of genuine strategic complexity, and they were played by everyone: soldiers, merchants, slaves, emperors. Claudius was reportedly so devoted to dice games that he designed a special board for playing in his carriage. Augustus played board games regularly. The imperial dignity was not considered incompatible with sitting across a game board from someone.
The most popular Roman board game was probably ludus latrunculorum — the game of brigands, or the soldier game — a two-player strategy game played on a rectangular grid with stones or pieces of two colors. The rules are not fully preserved, which has led to significant scholarly reconstruction efforts; what is clear from ancient descriptions is that the game involved capturing opponent’s pieces by surrounding them, that it required strategic thinking of a kind that ancient writers compared to military planning, and that strong players were respected for their skill in ways that suggest the game had real strategic depth. Ovid recommends skill at latrunculi as attractive to women, which suggests the game’s social profile was similar to chess’s in a later period.
Twelve-line — duodecim scripta — was a race game played on a board with three rows of twelve points, with pieces moved according to dice throws, the goal being to get all one’s pieces off the board before one’s opponent. It is a distant ancestor of backgammon, sharing the same basic structure of race-based movement with dice-determined moves, though the specific rules differed. The game boards, often with witty inscriptions around their edges, have been recovered from across the empire, suggesting it was as close to a universal Roman game as any. The blend of skill — in deciding how to move when multiple options existed — with luck — in the dice throws that determined movement — was apparently the right balance for casual gaming culture.
Knucklebones — tali — were among the most ancient gaming devices in use in Rome, four-sided animal ankle bones used as dice. Unlike the cubic dice that generated values from one to six, knucklebones had four usable faces with values of one, three, four, and six, and four were typically thrown together. The highest throw — all four faces showing different values, the Venus throw — was the best; the lowest — all ones, the dog throw — was the worst. Knucklebones were also used in a skill game resembling jacks: the bones were thrown into the air and caught on the back of the hand, or specific combinations were attempted. The double function — as dice and as skill-game objects — made them remarkably versatile toys that appear in the hands of children, adults, and the divine alike in Roman art.
The game of Tic-tac-toe or noughts-and-crosses — called terni lapilli, three stones — was played on a three-by-three grid and appears in scratched form on surfaces across the Roman world, the universal doodle game of a literate culture with styluses and hard surfaces. The Romans also played a game called nine men’s morris — merels — on a pattern of three concentric squares connected by lines, moving pieces and attempting to form rows of three. Both games are still played today in essentially the same form as their Roman versions, which makes them among the most durable entertainment technologies in human history.
Children’s toys and games intersected with adult gaming culture in ways that the Romans did not always sharply distinguish. Hoops rolled with sticks, balls of various materials thrown and caught, small clay animals and figures, miniature carts and kitchen equipment — the material culture of Roman childhood was recognizable and has continued with modifications into the modern world. The Roman distinction between children’s play and adult games was more about the stakes — children didn’t gamble, generally — than about the form of the activity.
The moral ambiguity of gaming culture was a consistent theme in Roman moralizing literature. Gambling was legally restricted, associated with lower-class establishments and their vices, and periodically condemned by figures who simultaneously acknowledged its universal practice. The tension between enjoyment and condemnation that surrounds gaming in Roman literature is not unique to Rome — it appears in virtually every literate culture that has games worth playing and moralists worth reading — but the Roman version is well documented and entirely recognizable. The games were fun. The fun was suspicious. Everyone played anyway.