Roman board games

"Még a kockajátékból származó nyereséget sem vetette meg, hanem akár hazugsággal, sőt hamis esküvel is igyekezett többet nyerni. Egyszer átadta a játszmát a mellette ülő játékosnak, kilépett az atriumába, és két gazdag római lovagot, akik éppen elhaladtak a ház előtt, azon nyomban elfogatott, vagyonukat pedig elkoboztatta. Aztán ragyogó arccal visszatért társaihoz, és eldicsekedett, hogy ilyen remek dobása még sohasem volt." 1 E szavakkal jellemzi Suetonius, a római életrajzíró Caligulát, a zsarnok császárt. A kocka (alea) kevésbé volt fontos számára, mint a játék során szerzett nyeremény, amit akár tisztességtelen úton is hajlandó volt megkaparintani. Talán különösnek tűnhet, hogy Suetonius majdnem mindegyik császár életrajzába beleszövi azok kedvenc játékait, illetve azt is fontos jellemvonásnak tartja, ha valaki egyáltalán nem játszik, mint például Tiberius. Ebben az írásban azt vizsgálom meg, hogy milyen tulajdonságok bemutatására használja Suetonius a játékokat.

Since before the beginning of recorded history, board games have been a constant source of fascination and entertainment for human beings. From 7000-year-old bone dice and the Ancient Egyptian religious game of Senet to the spread of chess throughout medieval Eurasia, the history of board games is as sprawling, oftentimes mysterious, and complex as history itself. Though sometimes correctly characterized as meaningless fun or simple distractions, board games have also been assigned varying degrees of spiritual, cultural, and competitive importance. Often this importance can be examined not only to learn more about board games but also about the people who played them. In History of Board Games Throughout the Ages, we take a general look at the history of board games from ancient to modern times, including some of the most popular and influential board games ever played, their various roles in the societies and cultures they occupied, and the reasons why board games are so compelling and fun for us humans in the first place.

In the rescue excavation project, conducted in 2001-2002 at the private property plot K. Diakogeorgiou at the city of Rhodes, an incised board for the nine men’s Morris game was discovered.
The board game was clearly incised at the lower surface of an ancient roof tile fragment, after its disposal. The historical analysis and the geographical distribution of the game, points out that it was already known in Roman times, even though finds from Roman Greece are scarce. Furthermore, the game was well known and favorable in Medieval Europe and is attested also in many crusader sites in the Holy lands, as well as in sites from Greece associated with the presence of Western Europeans in late Medieval times. In the aforementioned historical framework the board game from Rhodes can easily be associated with the presence of the order of St. John, the Hospitalliers, on the island.
Nevertheless the stratigraphical data, the spatial analysis of the plot, in association with its proximity to the medieval fortifications of the city of Rhodes, and the fact that the game was already known in Islamic world from the 9th century, lead to another assumption, that the board game could have been also used in the intermissions of battles during the second siege of Rhodes by the Ottomans in 1522.

Several artefacts related to gaming were unearthed in Apulum, coming from the civil
areas, the fort or the necropolises. Their majority is represented by bone or antler counters and dices. Our paper focuses mainly on the game supports, rather than on these categories of small finds. The aim of the study is to present four unpublished game boards, used for the Nine Men’s Morris game, for ludus latrunculorum and for a game that we cannot precisely name, either latina gaudes or another one, unknown to us.

In epoca greca e romana, i giochi rappresentavano una componente fondamentale della vita privata di adulti e bambini appartenenti ai ceti più bassi, così come a quelli più alti. Dei giochi atletici, tra cui i celeberrimi giochi olimpici, e dei combattimenti, di cui i ludi gladiatori sono solo i più noti, ai quali il popolo partecipava da spettatore, è giunta ricca testimonianza grazie alle fonti scritte ed archeologiche. Esse tuttavia permettono di ricostruire, almeno in parte, anche il mondo meno appariscente, ma altrettanto interessante, rappresentato di giochi giocati dai greci e dai romani nella quotidianità. I termini greci e latini per "gioco" (rispettivamente paignion e ludus) includevano sia gli spettacoli, che i giochi da tavolo, i dadi, i giochi dei bambini...
I giochi da tavola, dai più complessi di strategia fino ai più semplici, diffusi come giochi d´azzardo, erano generalmente appannaggio degli uomini.
I giochi greci di cui è giunta notizia fino a noi sono il Pente grammai, la Cubea e la Polis (spesso nominata Patteia), dal quale sembra aver tratto origine il celebre "Gioco dei soldati" romano (Ludus Latruncolorum). Anche a Roma si giocava una grande varietà di giochi, oltre al già citato Ludus Latruncolorum, conosciamo giochi come Duodecim scripta, Alea, "Filetto" e "Fossette".
Molti dei giochi che hanno allietato la vita di greci e romani, diffusi in diverse varianti, sono stati tramandati per secoli e rappresentano i precursori dei giochi moderni.

Both literary and archaeological evidence indicates that the playing of board games was a widespread and culturally significant phenomenon of the Roman world. In spite of their common presence, ancient board games have been paid little attention by the disciplines studying classical antiquity, and especially their material aspect has been neglected. In most studies, a game board is seen primarily as a particular disposition of places for the counters, in order to identify the types of games that were played on a given board; much less attention is paid to the materiality of the actual boards. Yet, in several cities of southwestern Asia Minor, game boards have been found carved on large stone blocks which must have been part of a more permanent setup or installation. Together with their formal attributes and their prominent locations in public spaces, they can be considered public installations. The focus of enquiry of this article is a series of such monumental boards that have been unearthed at the ancient Pisidian city of Sagalassos (southwestern Asia Minor). The analysis of these boards will not only identify the type of game these were used for but will also provide information on their materiality and location. The presentation of the boards will be used to address further questions. Although very popular, dicing was generally frowned upon by public authorities which makes public installations for these practices somewhat surprising. What caused such a different attitude in this and other cities of southwestern Asia Minor towards a popular practice that was generally condoned but never publicly supported? The paper will try to approach this aspect by looking at another type of public installations erected for dicing and restricted to this part of the Mediterranean, the astragalos oracle.

Board gaming has to a large degree, been studied based on historical sources. Ironically, this is true even for prehistoric games, where the Icelandic sagas have been used as a starting point for a deductive hunt for the mysterious game Hnefatafl. Later studies of gaming have to a large extent been transferring older research results. According to the author, this has created a rather skewed picture of historic games, which he means to problemise.
The author of this thesis will use gaming material from Scania as a starting point for an inductive study. Both archaeological and historical sources will be used as a basis for the results, but due to the over-representation of historical studies on the subject, the archaeological material will be given far more room in this study.
For the analysis of the Scanian material, studies from the whole Scandinavia will be used as a comparison material. The objective of the thesis will be to connect gaming items to their user, and to shed some light on what made persons of the past take up gaming.
The author manages to deconstruct many of the widely accepted interpretations about historic and prehistoric gaming. Checkered gaming boards from the Iron Age cannot be accepted without question as being used for Hnefatafl, Chess was not a game for knights alone, and women and children might have had an even bigger part of the evolution of board games than previously acknowledged.

We discuss in particular the "game boards" inscribed into the roof of the Seti temple at el-Qurna, the problem of the "dux" piece in the Roman Latrunculi game, the presumed Roman origin of hopscotch, and the identification of those 26-sided dice with presumed Latin abbreviations.

Two ‘duodecim scripta’ boards have been found in the on-going excavations of the ancient city of Kibyra, located in the city of Burdur’s Gölhisar district. The first one is of limestone. Like the other examples, this board was curved as to be a shallow pool. The second board was found in the 2014 excavations of the Agora’s first Terrace Street. The table had been reused in the base of a fountain which was constructed around the 5th - 6th centuries AD In this article, from these examples from the Kibyra excavations, comparisons are drawn with other examples and an inquiry is made concerning
‘duodecim scripta’.

In 2010 a Roman token was discovered in the mud of the Thames near Putney Bridge in London. When the token was discovered to have an erotic image on one side and a Roman numeral on the other, and was identified in a Museum of London press release as a rare Roman “brothel token”, the press reported on the story in the expected manner, for example: “A Roman coin that was probably used by soldiers to pay for sex in brothels has been discovered on the banks of the River Thames” (Daily Telegraph, 4 Jan 2012) and “Bronze discs depicting sex acts, like the one discovered in London, were used to hire prostitutes – and directly led to the birth of pornography during the Renaissance” (The Guardian, 4 Jan 2012).

Even before this particular spate of media interest, these curious  tokens have generated confusion, speculation and prurience – often simultaneously. They are of interest to games scholars because the speculation often includes the suggestion these objects may have had a ludic function, and were used as game counters.

This paper examines some of the proposals that have been offered by way of explanation of these peculiar objects, concluding they are neither "brothel tokens" nor game pieces, but are likely to have been locker tokens.

"Playing at the frontier – on two Roman gaming boards from the limes hinterland
The gaming board from Nassenfels (Lkr. Eichstätt) can be associated with the ludus XII scriptorum. In view of the execution
of the triangles on the playing field the author only knows of one parallel, i.e. a gaming board in Autun (Sâoneet-
Loire/F). The gaming board was incised in a tile laid out for drying, hastily but by all means with a trained hand. It
served as distraction for the workers in the tilery until the building tile was delivered. In a villa in Möckenlohe
(Lkr. Eichstätt) rect angular fields for the Small Nine Men’s Morris were incised in a plate. Both examples demonstrate
the popularity of games in antiquity and that gaming boards were often made spontaneously from available material.
However, it should not remain unconsidered that these games were often played for money which means that leisure
was not necessarily the priority. M. S.

Jouer sur la frontière – à propos de deux plateaux de jeu de l’arrière-pays du limes
Le plateau de jeu de Nassenfels (Lkr. Eichstätt) peutêtre mis en relation avec le ludus XII scriptorum. Vu la réalisation
de ce plateau composée de triangles, le seul exemple qui soit connu à l’auteur est un plateau de jeu en provenance
d’Autun (Sâone-et-Loire/F). Le plateau de jeu a été incisé sommairement mais avec une main très sûre sur une brique
qui était en cours de séchage et a servi aux tuiliers pour un bref instant de repos avant d’être livré comme matériau de
con struction. Une assiette en provenance d’une villa à Möckenlohe (Lkr. Eichstätt) a été incisée de manière à pouvoir
servir de plateau de jeu du moulin. Ces deux exemples montrent que dans l’antiquité aussi, on aimait prendre le temps
de jouer, et qu’à cet effet il n’était pas rare de réaliser un plateau de jeu stante pede sur les matériaux disponibles. Il
ne faut cependant pas oublier que beaucoup de ces jeux étaient des jeux d’argent et ne représente donc pas un simple
loisir."

In the evolution of game diagrams and rules boardgames have come to mirror not only cultural aspects but also the transformations in the collective psyche. The boardgame portrays the collective psyche in the form of mandala shapes pertaining to the whole numbers, such as three and four. The symbolic values of the different geometries and numbers are recurrent themes in cultural history, and denote different stages in the progression of consciousness. In particular, the boardgame can be understood as an equivalent of the vessel in medieval alchemy.

Keywords: mandala, quaternity, trinitarian, Self, alchemy, sacred game, psychic structure, divination.

In this article we present a group of circular and spherical pieces from the Roman "villa" o El Saucedo (Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, Spain). They consist above all of ceramic tokens for gameboards, marbles, weights, anphorae lids and a possible pendant.

In 2010 a Roman token was discovered in the mud of the Thames near Putney Bridge in London. When the token was discovered to have an erotic image on one side and a Roman numeral on the other, and was identified in a Museum of London press release as a rare Roman " brothel token " , the press reported on the story in the expected manner, for example: " A Roman coin that was probably used by soldiers to pay for sex in brothels has been discovered on the banks of the River Thames " (Daily Telegraph, 4 Jan 2012) and " Bronze discs depicting sex acts, like the one discovered in London, were used to hire prostitutes – and directly led to the birth of pornography during the Renaissance " (Guardian, 4 Jan 2012). Even before this particular spate of media interest, these curious tokens have generated confusion, speculation and prurience – often simultaneously. They are of interest to games scholars because the speculation often includes the suggestion these objects may have had a ludic function, and were used as game counters. This paper will look at some of the proposals that have been offered by way of explanation of these peculiar objects. Eddie Duggan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology at the University of Suffolk. He has recently contributed " Squaring the (Magic) Circle: A Brief Definition and History of Pervasive Games " to Nijholt ed. Playable Cities, Springer (2017) and, with Professor David Gill, co-edited a volume of conference proceedings: From Cardboard to Keyboard: Proceedings of the XVII Annual Colloquium of the International Board Game Studies Association, Associação Ludus, Lisbon (2016).

The firts comprehensive book of Merels Board. From its origins through the history and geography of one of the most popular board games in the world, who took powerful magic and symbolic meanings over time. The essay also contains the global census and eleven statistical graphs easy to use. With 149 color photos.