Authors:
Walter Crist, Eric Piette

Venue:
European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), 2025

Topics:
ancient games, Mesopotamia, Royal Game of Ur, AI simulation, gameplay metrics, digital archaeoludology

Links: PDF

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, played across Mesopotamia and neighbouring regions for millennia. Over time, its board geometry evolved into the so-called ?game of twenty squares,? suggesting a significant transformation in gameplay experience.

This work investigates these changes by applying AI-simulated play to reconstructed rules of the game, enabling the measurement of gameplay characteristics such as game length, player advantage, and ?drama? (i.e., fluctuations in expected outcomes during play).

By comparing these metrics across different board geometries and historical contexts, the study provides insights into how gameplay experiences may have evolved alongside cultural and geographical shifts in the ancient world.

This work lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and archaeology, illustrating how simulation-based approaches can be used to study ancient games beyond textual or material evidence alone.

By leveraging AI to generate large-scale play data, it becomes possible to quantitatively analyse historical game variants and better understand how rule or board changes impacted player experience.

This approach contributes to the broader goals of digital archaeoludology and the GameTable initiative, using computational tools to reconstruct and interpret cultural heritage through games.

Crist, W., Piette, E. (2025). Changing the Game: Measuring Mesopotamian Games With AI-Simulated Play. European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) Annual Meeting.

@inproceedings{crist2025mesopotamian_games,
  author    = {Crist, Walter and Piette, Eric},
  title     = {Changing the Game: Measuring Mesopotamian Games With AI-Simulated Play},
  booktitle = {European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting},
  year      = {2025}
}