I beat both on hard fairly easily? Came back to comments expecting remarks on the shape of the board allowing for fairly easy "I just move back an forth as a hare" and "I just wait for you to move wrong as a hound"
As hares, if you rush one of the middle nodes, the hound machine could capture, but it never figured out moving two hounds all the way over to do so in my play. As hounds, it's basically the same, you just make sure none of the hares ever get "behind" you because then it's a lot harder to contain them.
> No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025).
> Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics....
> Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations.
I would say this is more "inspired by" Ancient Rome.
The thing missing here is that nearly all of the games that use these nodes + stones are a variant on Nine Men's Morris (or Twelve Men's Morris, or etc). Discovering the ruleset for a particular variant is kind of like discovering a new version of "Uno" based on uncovering new house rules.
Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.
I always like to hear about ancient board game reconstructions. Like music and religion, games are something every culture creates. Another recent example is the case of Liubu, a game from ancient China for which the rules were lost. Still, a reconstruction is being attempted by Carnegie Melon:
The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!
The AI could have constructed any number of rules seeing as how it's literally a "best guess" and it chose rules that aren't very fun. Congratulations, I guess.
Edit: Or, put a different way: Sometimes the rules to games are lost for a reason; they're not very good.
I was thinking of them yesterday because I noticed one for sale in the antiquities shop in Andor, which brought up all sorts of Earth/Rome/Star Wars cannon questions.
The best explanation anyone has come up with for those dodecahedrons was as tools for making jewelry from gold wire. Here's a video by an expert knitter named Amy Gaines in which she demonstrates the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADTLozKm0I
The segment where she uses a replica dodecahedron to make a chain from aluminum wire (stiffer than gold, meaning this would have been easier with actual gold) is entirely convincing. It explains everything about the shape of the objects, both the protruding knobs on the end and also the fact that the holes are of different sizes.
Think of this as a very old game, with a board simple enough you can trace it on the ground and play with a few stones, with rules simple enough you can explain/understand in 30 seconds. Like tic-tac-toe, mancala, nim, chopsticks... simplicity and portability wins over perfect rules or balance.
The rules seem like a rather boring pre-decessor to the mills game/nine men's morris. I guess this is what I would draw inspiration from though, to make the game more interesting, because the board is actually kind of neat.
Since the rules are entirely reconstructed, I have to say I'm a bit skeptical of a game where a central point is keeping a count of moves up to 150. It seems too unpractical for a casual game.
Are there other known ancient games that work like this?
Similar in that it is asymmetrical, very old, and we don't quite know what the rules were (though with tafl we have slightly better historical evidence, including an account from Carl Linnaeus in 1732, which has allowed us to produce a few educated guesses). In fact tafl is sometimes speculated to derive from the Roman game of ludus latrunculorum - I'm not sure if that is the same game described here.
i think i broke the bot! i won on hard w the hares.
figured out that my hares needed to stay together in either the top or bottom center and left corners of the big square.
at one point the bot started wasting moves so i repeated mine until it ran out! not sure if I found the deterministic win of the game or it was a bug in the AI.
I really liked this game, but it frustrates me a little bit that there only seems to be one way to win. Or at least I've only found one. If I play the hardest AI, I can consistently win, with the right sequence, but it always ends up on the right side with the hares next to each other.
Is it like chess only way more obvious, that the first mover wins, and if so, wouldn't the Romans have figured it out?
Or am I just exploiting a weakness in the AI and a human would make better choices?
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadAs hares, if you rush one of the middle nodes, the hound machine could capture, but it never figured out moving two hounds all the way over to do so in my play. As hounds, it's basically the same, you just make sure none of the hares ever get "behind" you because then it's a lot harder to contain them.
> Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics....
> Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations.
I would say this is more "inspired by" Ancient Rome.
Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.
https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/liubo-lab/
The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!
Edit: Or, put a different way: Sometimes the rules to games are lost for a reason; they're not very good.
I was thinking of them yesterday because I noticed one for sale in the antiquities shop in Andor, which brought up all sorts of Earth/Rome/Star Wars cannon questions.
The segment where she uses a replica dodecahedron to make a chain from aluminum wire (stiffer than gold, meaning this would have been easier with actual gold) is entirely convincing. It explains everything about the shape of the objects, both the protruding knobs on the end and also the fact that the holes are of different sizes.
There needs to be something to stop a deadlock. Like an element of luck for the hares?
Here's a tablebase analysis for a simple bear game I constructed a while back: https://emarzion.github.io/coqtbgen/
Are there other known ancient games that work like this?
Similar in that it is asymmetrical, very old, and we don't quite know what the rules were (though with tafl we have slightly better historical evidence, including an account from Carl Linnaeus in 1732, which has allowed us to produce a few educated guesses). In fact tafl is sometimes speculated to derive from the Roman game of ludus latrunculorum - I'm not sure if that is the same game described here.
figured out that my hares needed to stay together in either the top or bottom center and left corners of the big square.
at one point the bot started wasting moves so i repeated mine until it ran out! not sure if I found the deterministic win of the game or it was a bug in the AI.
Is it like chess only way more obvious, that the first mover wins, and if so, wouldn't the Romans have figured it out?
Or am I just exploiting a weakness in the AI and a human would make better choices?