Authors:
Walter Crist, Eric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Cameron Browne

Venue:
The Archaeology of Play: Material Approaches to Games and Gaming in the Ancient World, edited by Véronique Dasen and Marco Vespa, Oxbow, Oxford, 2024

Topics:
digital archaeoludology, ancient games, reconstruction, Ludii, cultural heritage, game analysis

Links: PDF

This chapter presents a computational approach to the recognition and reconstruction of ancient games, using the Roman game Ludus Latrunculorum as a case study.

Drawing on the Digital Ludeme Project and the Ludii general game system, the chapter combines archaeological and textual evidence with AI-based self-play analyses to evaluate candidate rulesets on different historical board configurations.

The study shows how computational analyses can help identify plausible reconstructions, rule out less likely interpretations, and support a more systematic study of ancient game heritage.

This chapter is a strong example of how your research connects artificial intelligence, game studies, and archaeology.

It shows that computational methods can contribute not only to playing games, but also to recognising and reconstructing historical games from incomplete evidence. In particular, the analysis of Ludus Latrunculorum combines game concepts, board evidence, and AI self-play to test how plausible different candidate rulesets are.

The chapter also illustrates an important principle of digital archaeoludology: computational analysis may not reveal exactly how a game was played, but it can provide strong evidence for how it was unlikely to have been played, which is often equally valuable in historical reconstruction.

Crist, W., Piette, E., Soemers, D. J. N. J., Stephenson, M., Browne, C. (2024). Computational Approaches for Recognising and Reconstructing Ancient Games: The Case of Ludus Latrunculorum. In V. Dasen and M. Vespa (Eds.), The Archaeology of Play: Material Approaches to Games and Gaming in the Ancient World. Oxbow, Oxford.

@incollection{crist2024latrunculorum,
  author    = {Crist, Walter and Piette, Eric and Soemers, Dennis J. N. J. and Stephenson, Matthew and Browne, Cameron},
  title     = {Computational Approaches for Recognising and Reconstructing Ancient Games: The Case of Ludus Latrunculorum},
  booktitle = {The Archaeology of Play: Material Approaches to Games and Gaming in the Ancient World},
  editor    = {Dasen, Véronique and Vespa, Marco},
  publisher = {Oxbow},
  address   = {Oxford},
  year      = {2024}
}