A Roman board game buried for centuries is back in play at Vindolanda.
The reproduction is based on a stone board found at Vindolanda, an archaeological site in England near Hadrian’s Wall. A Roman frontier fort and town occupied between roughly 85 C.E. and 200 C.E., and several thousand people lived there at any one time.
Vindolanda has been only a quarter excavated, but it has already yielded many artifacts, including board games. Archaeologists found this game in 2019, buried between a bathhouse drain and a workshop wall beside a road from the third century C.E.
The artifact had split into five pieces. It also appeared to have been repurposed at some point as a flagstone, with the foundations of a farm built on top of it.
The game was found outside Vindolanda’s fort, which suggests civilians, including women and children, played it, not only soldiers. More than a dozen sets of Ludus Latrunculorum have been found at Vindolanda alone.
Before the game was loaned to Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, researchers at Newcastle University scanned each piece with a handheld Artec 3D Spider scanner, according to 3Dprinting.com, to create a virtual 3D model. They then printed a copy of the board in polylactic acid plastic.
“It was amazing to be involved in the actual scanning process and to see something so complex and historical be realistically recreated,” Sophie Westlake, the activity and diversity officer of the Vindolanda Trust, says in a statement.
“It will be very beneficial for the Vindolanda Trust to have a replica Roman game board and 3D interactive model, both whilst the original Roman board is on loan and to create a more engaging, tactile experience for the visitor.”
Visitors to Vindolanda will be able to play Ludus Latrunculorum on the recreated board at the Roman Army Museum.
There is no definitive surviving set of rules, but descriptions from history have led researchers to think it resembled checkers. Two players are thought to have tried to capture their opponent’s pieces by trapping them between their own.
Ancient writings also mention the game, which is sometimes called “the game of little brigands,” “the game of little robbers,” or “soldiers.”
“You vary the moves of your counters on the open board, and wars are fought out by a soldiery of glass, so that at one time a white counter traps blacks, and at another a black traps whites,” reads an early reference to the game from the Roman empire.
“Our future research will look at these social aspects of gaming and in doing so, we hope to cast new light on the everyday life of the Vindolanda community,” reads a statement from the Vindolanda Charitable Trust.
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