Researchers have combined artificial intelligence with high-resolution 3D scans to decode a mysterious limestone game board discovered in the Netherlands, revealing it to be an ancient Roman blocking game dating back to the Roman Empire.
Unlocking the Mystery of the Coriovallum Limestone Slab
More than a century ago, a scratched-up slab of limestone was excavated in the modern-day Netherlands and later catalogued as an ancient Roman game board. For generations, the rules and name of the game remained entirely unknown. That changed when Walter Crist, a researcher studying ancient games, examined the artifact at the Het Romeins Museum in the southern Dutch city of Heerlen.
The museum sits atop the ruins of Coriovallum, a Roman village famous for its ancient baths. When Crist first inspected the thick oval-shaped stone, he noticed something previous observers had missed: distinct wear patterns. From a specific angle, the surface revealed that ancient players had repeatedly slid hard pieces across the rock in identical patterns.
“They had this thing that they were calling a game,” Crist tells NPR’s Henry Larson. “I looked at it and it was interesting to me because it was not a pattern that I had really recognized.”
Walter Crist, researcher of ancient games at Leiden University
How Artificial Intelligence Reconstructed the Lost Rules
Because no written rulebook survived alongside the artifact, researchers turned to modern technology to recreate how people played. Luk van Goor, working with a local conservation business called Restaura, captured extremely detailed 3D scans of the game board. These digital models showed that certain incised lines on the stone were a fraction of a millimeter deeper than others, indicating areas of intense use.
With precise physical data in hand, the team integrated a general game-playing artificial intelligence system known as Ludii, developed by computer scientist Dennis Soemers at Maastricht University.
We trained Ludii with the rules of about a hundred medieval or older games from the same cultural area as the Roman stone,
Soemers explained in a statement released by Maastricht University, as reported in Smithsonian Magazine. The AI generated dozens of potential rule sets, playing the game against itself across 1,000 rounds per set to identify viable options.
Matching Board Wear With AI-Simulated Strategy
To narrow down the possibilities, researchers compared the automated gameplay movements against the physical wear signatures on the stone slab. Out of the simulations, investigators isolated nine distinct rule sets that aligned directly with the deeper grooves carved into the limestone.
According to findings published in the journal Antiquity, every matching rule set belonged to a category known as blocking games, where one player attempts to restrict another’s movement, similar to modern tic-tac-toe. In these particular variations, the player holding more pieces attempts to block the player with fewer pieces.
Connecting the Ancient Past to Modern Play
While similar blocking games were played in Scandinavia during the 19th and 20th centuries, this Roman discovery pushes the known timeline of such mechanics back centuries further in Europe. The research team named the newly decoded pastime Ludus Coriovalli, translating to the game from Coriovallum.
Experts note that board games often form enduring cultural threads across millennia. Barbara Carè, an archaeologist at the University of Lausanne who was not involved with the study, pointed out to NPR that researchers can trace the evolution of games from basic ancient prototypes into more complex modern traditions by examining these developmental families.
What Remains Unanswered in Board Game Archaeology
Despite the success of the AI simulations in replicating physical wear patterns, many questions regarding daily Roman leisure remain unaddressed. The sources do not establish who specifically manufactured the imported French limestone board, nor do they clarify whether the game was played by soldiers, merchants, or local residents in Coriovallum.
Researchers hope the methodology deployed in the Netherlands will serve as a framework for decoding other unwritten artifacts housed in museum collections worldwide. By bridging computational game systems with physical wear analysis, investigators have opened a new pathway to understanding how people across the ancient world spent their free time.
