Summary

Ancient board games are an important part of cultural heritage, but museum displays and conventional two-dimensional interfaces often separate visitors from the physical interaction, spatial presence, and social experience that give these games meaning. This thesis investigates virtual reality as a way to make reconstructed historical games playable, embodied, and culturally situated.

The main contribution is a generic framework that transforms Ludii game descriptions into interactive three-dimensional and virtual reality experiences in Unreal Engine. The system processes Ludii files at runtime, extracts game equipment and rules, generates boards and pieces procedurally, supports spatial interaction, executes game logic, and integrates generic AI agents. Its architecture is designed to support a broad range of games rather than a single handcrafted implementation.

The framework is demonstrated through an interactive VR adaptation of Ludus Coriovalli, an ancient Roman board game reconstructed through computational research. The resulting experience places the game within a cultural heritage context and illustrates applications for museums, public engagement, and the collection of behavioural data for future human-like game AI research.

User demonstrations and feedback indicate that the approach can make historical games more engaging and accessible while preserving the generality of Ludii. The work provides a first step toward automatically rendering and playing large collections of ancient board games in VR and lays foundations for richer museum experiences and future studies of human gameplay behaviour.

Suggested citation

Bellière, A., & Noiset, F. (2026). Transforming Ancient Board Games into Interactive VR Cultural Heritage Experiences. Master's thesis, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain).