AI Reconstructs Rules of a 1,800-Year-Old Roman Board Game From a Carved Stone

Researchers have recovered the rules of Ludus Coriovalli, a Roman blocking game that had been unplayable for roughly 1,800 years because no written instructions survived. The only surviving evidence was a carved slab of Jurassic limestone (Object 04433) held in a museum in Heerlen, the Netherlands — the site of the Roman town Coriovallum. Microscopic use-wear analysis showed one diagonal line on the stone had been polished smoother than the surrounding surface, the telltale signature of pieces being slid across it over centuries of play.

To turn those physical traces into a working ruleset, the team fed candidate rules into the Ludii general game system and ran Alpha-Beta search agents through 1,000 simulated games per configuration. Nine rule sets produced wear patterns matching the stone, all of them asymmetric blocking games; the most consistent match pits four Hounds against two Hares on a 19-node graph, with the Hounds trying to trap the more agile Hares and the Hares trying to survive 150 turns. The work was published in Antiquity in 2025.

The linked project turns one of these AI-validated configurations into a free browser game, playable against three difficulty levels of the Alpha-Beta AI or a local opponent, with no download or signup. Beyond the novelty, it is a clean demonstration of using simulation and game-tree search as an inference tool — reconstructing lost human knowledge from material evidence rather than text.