The Games of Ancient Rome – How Romans Played for Fun and Money

Humans have been playing games for as long as we've been around, and the Romans were no exception. But what exactly did they play? Chess? Checkers? Cards? Those classics, familiar to us for centuries, hadn't been invented yet. So what filled Roman game tables? Some of their pastimes survived almost unchanged, while others evolved beyond recognition or disappeared entirely. One of the Romans' most popular games has actually survived to this day. We don't know its ancient name, but today we call it Mill, or Nine Men's Morris. The word Morris likely comes from the Latin morellus, the term for the playing pieces. The board consists of three concentric squares connected by straight horizontal and vertical lines. Players place their pieces on the board's corners and intersections, trying to line up three in a row. This formation is called a mill, and it allows the player to remove one of the opponent's pieces. Once all of the pieces are on the board, the second phase begins. Players take turns moving their pieces, trying to create new mills. When the player is down to just three pieces, they gain the ability to move them freely, and the game ends when one player has fewer than three pieces left. These are the modern rules. The ancient rules were almost certainly different. The free movement rule for a player with only three pieces, for example, appeared only in the 18th century and still isn't universally accepted today. Mill is an extremely old game, and not a Roman invention. The earliest known depiction of a dating to around 1400 BC. Similar board patterns have also been discovered in Mesopotamia and Syria long before the Roman Empire. Ovid mentions the game in Ars Amatoria, and his description suggests that each player used only three pieces, unlike the modern version with nine. That three-piece variant still exists today. This game was incredibly popular. The Romans seemed to have played it everywhere, sometimes on proper boards with carved pieces, and sometimes by simply scratching the grid onto whatever surface was available. Archaeologists continue to find mill boards etched into the floors of Roman buildings, from imperial palaces to brothels and even gladiator schools. Ovid also notes that women in particular loved this game. The next Roman board game is Latrunculi. In Latin, Latrunculi means mercenaries, and the full expression Ludus Latrunculorum translates to the game of mercenaries. The game was also sometimes called Calculi, meaning little stones. But Latrunculi is a puzzle. On one hand, it appears far more frequently in ancient texts than Mill, and a few sources even describe fragments of its rules and basic strategy. On the other hand, we still don't actually know how the game was played. Mill can be reconstructed thanks to its modern rules. Latrunculi cannot. Every modern rule set is just a scholarly attempt to piece things together from scattered Roman references. We don't know the board's size, the number of pieces, or how or even whether they were arranged at the start. It's entirely possible that players simply placed their pieces freely before beginning the game. And when it comes to the board's size, the number of pieces, and starting layouts, the most convincing reconstruction comes from the burial known as the Druid of Colchester. This grave dates to the mid-first century AD, right around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain. Archaeologists found Roman medical tools, objects used for divination, which is why the man buried there is popularly called a Druid, though he was probably a physician, and a full board game set. The pieces were still arranged exactly as they had been left. The board itself was wooden and didn't survive, but the number of pieces and the spacing between them suggests an 8x12 playing field. Before the game began, the pieces seemed to have been placed in a single row along the long edges of the board, with one piece positioned slightly ahead of the others. But this reconstruction only works if the Colchester find actually represents Latrunculi rather than some entirely different ancient game. Some scholars even argue that it wasn't a game at all, but another tool for divination. In the end, the true purpose of the board can't be determined with certainty. Ancient written sources, however, do clarify a few rules. A piece could move one square in any direction. If a player managed to place two of their own pieces on opposite sides of an opponent's piece, that piece was captured and removed from the board. But if a player willingly moved one of their own pieces between two enemy pieces, it was not captured. Much like in modern checkers, the game continued until one player lost all of their pieces or ended up completely blocked. In some modern reconstructions, the piece placed ahead of the others was called the dux, a military leader or commander. The term comes from the Latin ducare, to lead. And from it, we also get the English duke, the Venetian doge, and the Italian duce. According to these reconstructions, the goal is to surround the dux on all four sides. But no ancient source mentions such a rule. It's a modern invention. The Romans likely adopted the game from the Greeks. There it was known as petia, meaning pebbles, or tablos, meaning board. It's an extremely old game, mentioned all the way back in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although nothing is certain, it's very plausible that latrinculi and tablos helped shape many later board games. The name of the Scandinavian-Germanic game Tafel, for example, comes from tablos. And while Tafel isn't identical to its Greek predecessor, the similarities are unmistakable. It's also quite possible that checkers evolved from tablos as well. The earliest known ancestor of checkers is the Arab game Al-Kharki, which already looks remarkably similar. Pieces not only move forward and sideways, but also diagonally. Backward moves are forbidden, and captures are made by jumping over an opponent's piece rather than surrounding it, just like in modern checkers. Captures are mandatory, and multiple jumps can be made in a single turn. It's easy to imagine the Arabs learning tablos from the Byzantines and modifying it into a faster, livelier game. On the other hand, some researchers believe that checkers came not from tablos, but from mill. If you imagine a chess board without its light squares, a checkers board does vaguely resemble a mill board. And one of the names of the Arab game, Kerkat, literally means mill. So it's also possible that the Arabs combined mill with tablos and ended up with Al-Kharki. The problem is that none of these theories can be proven. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and we'll probably never know how the game actually evolved. There's even a hypothesis that tablos spread eastward during Alexander the Great's campaigns and influenced the earliest prototypes of chess. And it's true that tablos pieces have been found in Bactria and the Indo-Greek kingdom. Still, the idea is a bit too speculative to take seriously. The next game is Tally. It was something between dice and poker. Each player had four D4-shaped dice marked 1, 2, 4, and 6. Players rolled them one by one, trying to build the strongest possible combination. The game often was played with astragali, the ankle bones of animals, which naturally land in only four stable positions. That's actually why dice are still called bones. People originally played not with carved cubes, but with real bones. There were many possible combinations, and all sixes wasn't the best one. The strongest result was four different values, meaning each die showed a unique number. This was called Venus. To prevent cheating, players used a small tower with steps at the bottom. Instead of throwing the dice onto the table, they dropped them into the tower and the dice tumbled out through the steps. This made it impossible to practice throwing a particular result. The game was typically played for money. Next comes Twelve Lines, an early ancestor of backgammon. The board consisted of three rows of twelve points each, though boards with more rows also existed. It was called an alveolus and was usually made of limestone, sometimes marble, which is why so many have survived. There were surely many wooden sets as well, but wood rarely lasts from antiquity. Each player had 15 pieces, usually made of colored glass or stone. Players rolled dice and advanced their pieces by the number shown. The goal was to move all of your pieces to the opposite end of the board while preventing your opponent from doing the same. You could block your opponent's pieces, and blocked pieces were called entice. Overall, the gameplay was very similar to modern backgammon. Another game was Tourney la Pili. The board may look unusual at first glance, but the gameplay is essentially identical to modern tic-tac-toe. The goal was the same, to line up three pieces. Most scholars believe it was simply a simplified children's version of mill. Among children's games, one of the most interesting is Nucis Castelletai. It was played with walnuts, and Roman children seemed to have an entire universe of walnut-based games. There was even a saying, Nucis relinquere, to leave the nuts behind, meaning to grow up and move on from childhood. In Nucis Castelletai, one player built little walnut pyramids called fortresses, and the others had to knock them down by throwing walnuts at them. In another version, the walnuts weren't thrown, but rolled down a ramp, and the goal was not to destroy the fortress, but to hit another player's walnut. There were undoubtedly many other varieties of walnut games that we no longer know about. Sometimes walnuts were replaced with small balls made of wood, ivory, or glass. In France, there's a popular theory that Pétanque descends from Roman walnut games, which themselves supposedly came from some lost Gallic game. But this theory has all of the hallmarks of a patriotic origin myth. There's no convincing evidence that Pétanque is anywhere near that ancient. We'll end with a game about which we know almost nothing, and we're not even sure it was a Across the Roman Empire, mostly in Italy, but also in Spain and Greece, archaeologists have found many small ivory tablets. Each tablet bears a word on one side, and a Roman numeral paired with a letter on the other. These are called Tesserae Lucerae. Their purpose is unknown, but the leading theory is that they were part of some Roman word game. The possibilities are endless. They might have worked like a simple ancient version of the alias, where cards contain words and numbers, players explain the word using other words, and a correct guess earns the points shown. But just as many other gaming mechanisms are plausible as well. Some scholars disagree altogether that these tablets were even gaming pieces in the first place. They propose alternative explanations that they were used for divination or as teaching aids for children learning to read, among several other possibilities. If you made it to the end of this video, we really appreciate it if you liked and subscribed. Follow along on our journey through ancient civilizations and history. We put out new episodes every single week. If you'd like to support the channel, join our Patreon, or become a YouTube channel member. 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