Authors:
Walter Crist, Matthew Stephenson, Eric Piette, Cameron Browne

Venue:
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024

Topics:
Ludii, databases, digital humanities, cultural heritage, traditional games, digital archaeoludology

Links: PDF · Digital Humanities Quarterly

Traditional board games are an important form of intangible cultural heritage, yet many have been abandoned, incompletely documented, or preserved through unreliable secondary sources.

This paper presents the Ludii Games Database as a comprehensive open-access resource for documenting board games across human history, linking games, rulesets, ludemes, and evidence within a unified scholarly framework.

The database supports both cultural research and the Ludii general game system, providing the knowledge base needed for AI-driven modelling, analysis, and future reconstruction of traditional games.

This article is an important contribution because it formalises the database infrastructure underlying much of the Digital Ludeme Project.

It explains how games are represented through the linked notions of games, rulesets, ludemes, and evidence, and how this structure supports both rigorous historical documentation and computational analysis.

More broadly, the paper positions the Ludii Games Database as a bridge between digital humanities and artificial intelligence, making traditional games accessible both as cultural artefacts and as computational objects of study.

Crist, W., Stephenson, M., Piette, E., Browne, C. (2024). The Ludii Games Database: A Resource for Computational and Cultural Research on Traditional Board Games. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 18(4).

@article{crist2024ludii_database,
  author  = {Crist, Walter and Stephenson, Matthew and Piette, Eric and Browne, Cameron},
  title   = {The Ludii Games Database: A Resource for Computational and Cultural Research on Traditional Board Games},
  journal = {Digital Humanities Quarterly},
  volume  = {18},
  number  = {4},
  year    = {2024},
  url     = {https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/18/4/000756/000756.html}
}