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With the help of AI, a team of researchers has discovered the purpose of an almost 2,000-year-old white stone that is in the possession of the Roman Museum in Heerlen. A rectangle has been carved into the oval piece of limestone with four diagonal stripes inside it. It was unclear what the intention was.
Researchers have now discovered that it was a strategy game played with glass, bone or earthenware pawns. The aim of the game is to block the other player’s pawns. Such games were already known from the Middle Ages. The discovery in Heerlen proves that they were played centuries earlier than previously assumed, the researchers said.
The research started by making very detailed 3D scans. “These scans make the traces on the stone clearly visible,” says Luk van Goor of Restaura restoration studio in Heerlen.
“Some of them are a fraction of a millimeter deeper than others. So those marks were used more intensively. We also see that the edges of the stone are beautifully finished, which indicates that this is a finished product and not a stone that needed further processing.”
Wear pattern
AI was used to determine the rules of the game. This happened at Maastricht University, where a project is underway that examines strategy games that have been played over the centuries. Employees trained the AI model Ludii with rules of about a hundred medieval or older games from the same cultural area.
“We found dozens of possible rules of the game,” says researcher Dennis Soemers. “Ludii played against itself with those rules and discovered a few variants that are fun for people to play.”
The researchers then looked to see whether the movements of the cones matched the wear on the stone in the museum. Playing with one set of rules indeed leads to the wear pattern discovered with the 3D scans.
No doubt about it
According to curator Karen Jeneson of The Roman Museum, there is no doubt. “We of course also looked at other possibilities for the use of the stone, such as a decorative element in architecture, but we could not find any other explanation. So it really concerns an unknown game from Roman times.”
On the website of Maastricht University are the rules of the game for those who want to try the game themselves.
date:2026-02-10 22:13:00