The possible game board with pencil marks highlighting the incised lines.
The worn lines on an engraved limestone object from the Netherlands are consistent with the idea that it was a Roman game board.
A mysterious flat stone with a geometric pattern of carved straight lines, revealed in a recent study in Antiquitycould be a never before seen roman board game.
Thousands of artificial intelligence simulations of how sliding pieces of stone or glass might have marked the surface suggest that this object was an early example of a type of “tetris” – which is not documented in Europe until several centuries later, in the Middle Ages.
Texts and material remains have revealed that the Romans played many board games. These include A game of chessor the soldiers’ game, in which the objective is to capture the other player’s pieces; and until the game of chicken.
It was in the Roman Museum of Heerlen, in the Netherlands, Walter Cristfrom Leiden University, also in the Netherlands, came across a flat stone measuring 212 by 145 millimeters, with a geometric pattern engraved on its upper face.
It was found in the Roman city of Coriovallumwhich is buried beneath present-day Heerlen, and the type of limestone from which it is made was often imported from France to be used in decorative elements of buildings between 250 and 476 dC.
“At first I was a little skeptical because It’s a pattern I’ve never seen before before, that’s why I asked the museum to look more closely”, said Crist, speaking to .
Then he found visible wear on the object’s surface, consistent with the hypothesis that someone may have pushed stone game pieces along the engraved lines.
The wear was irregular, however, with most of it concentrated in a certain diagonal line.
The possible game board with pencil marks highlighting the incised lines.
The results revealed that nine similar “tetris” games. These types of games have been documented in Europe since the Middle Ages.
