By Jackie Flynn Mogensen
Publication Date: 2026-02-10 10:00:00
February 10, 2026
3 Min. read
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Rules of a mysterious ancient Roman board game decoded by AI
A Roman stone board game has been unplayable since it was discovered more than a century ago, but the AI may have just worked out the rules
Researchers examined a possible game board, here with pencil markings to highlight the incised lines.
It was the summer of 2020 and researcher Walter Crist was walking through the exhibits in a Dutch museum dedicated to the presence of the ancient Roman Empire in the Netherlands. As a scholar who studies ancient board games, one exhibit in particular caught Crist’s eye: a stone game board from the late Roman Empire. It was about eight inches in diameter and was engraved with angular lines, roughly forming the shape of an elongated octagon within a rectangle.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ because the pattern on it – I’ve never seen that in literature before…
