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How do you go about learning the rules for a board game that's centuries-old? NPR's Henry Larson has that story.
HENRY LARSON, BYLINE: Walter Crist is a researcher in the Netherlands, and a few years ago, he came across a very interesting artifact at a local Dutch museum.
WALTER CRIST: They had this thing that they were calling a game, and I looked at it and it was interesting to me because it was not a pattern that I had really recognized.
LARSON: Crist studies ancient games at Leiden University, and according to the museum curators, that thing was a stone game board that was found in the ruins of an ancient Roman town years earlier.
CRIST: It's this oval-shaped stone, quite thick, so you can see the chiseling in this shape to have this surface on the top.
LARSON: The stone had a pattern etched into the top, a bit like the lines on a soccer field. Crist wasn't sure it was a game board, though.
CRIST: But then I looked at it at just kind of the right angle and noticed that it had been kind of worn along the lines of the board.
LARSON: Worn in a way that could have been from someone dragging a game piece across those lines in the stone...
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEM SCRAPING)
LARSON: ...Over...
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEM SCRAPING)
LARSON: ...And over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEM SCRAPING)
LARSON: The next big question for Crist was this.
CRIST: How might you figure out how to play this?
LARSON: That's a hard question to ask about a centuries-old rock. It's not like Crist could consult the directions. In fact, he suspected, even back in the day, players learned by observing others.
CRIST: It's the kind of thing that we still experience today with things like checkers or tic-tac-toe. You probably learned it from somebody who knew how to play it.
LARSON: So Crist and his team thought, could they find a similar game and figure out the ancient rules from there?
BARBARA CARE: Because the database is there, of course, you can search.
LARSON: This is Barbara Care. She studies the cultural importance of ancient games at the University of Lausanne, and that database she mentioned is like an encyclopedia of historic games.
CARE: You can find sort of families of games that have some similarities, so you may attempt to reconstruct the evolution of a game from maybe a basic, ancient form to a more developed one.
LARSON: Crist and his team went to work.
CRIST: We took Europe as a very general region and looked for games that were on smallish game boards. This board has only about 22 maximum possible places where you can place the pieces.
LARSON: The team selected more than 100 rule sets that might have involved players moving pieces in similar patterns to the damage on the mystery board. They just needed to figure out which rules would cause the right kind of wear on the rock.
CRIST: Now, we could do this with people. We could sit a bunch of people down and play thousands and thousands of rounds of the game...
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEM SCRAPING)
CRIST: ...Track how they move each piece at each turn.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEM SCRAPING)
LARSON: They didn't do that. Instead, the team had artificial intelligence models play each rule set 1,000 times each. And then...
CRIST: We analyzed the data and filtered them with the results and ended with nine, where people move the pieces along the lines just proportionately as they were found on the stone.
LARSON: All the matching rules were from one category of games - blocking games where two players move their pieces along the lines of the board, with one player trying to block the other's piece in a corner and trap them. Those kinds of games were known to exist in medieval Europe, but not so much in Roman times until now.
CRIST: One thing I really like about games is the way that they really can directly connect you to the past because it's a practice that has not changed in 5,000 years - the way that you move pieces along a board. You throw dice, and then you move them.
(SOUNDBITE OF DICE BEING ROLLED)
CRIST: It's something that's fundamentally the same, and it's very easy to replicate.
LARSON: Barbara Care, the other researcher, is also looking for that connection to the past.
CARE: We want to understand how and why ancient people played.
LARSON: But at least for now, exactly why people played this ancient Roman game is still lost to history. Henry Larson, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "THE KEEPER OF THE GRAIL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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