Ludus Latrunculorum
Roman Empire · Strategy
Ludus Latrunculorum
Roman Strategy Game · 1st century BC – 5th century AD
How to Play
Ludus Latrunculorum is a 2-player strategy game of capture and encirclement played on a grid board. Eliminate enough enemy pieces - or trap their Dux - to win.
- Pieces: Each side has regular latrones (soldiers) and one Dux (commander). The Dux is marked with a red-ochre ring on the board.
- Movement: Soldiers slide any number of squares horizontally or vertically (like a rook in chess), but cannot jump over pieces. The Dux moves the same way.
- Capture - Custodian rule: A piece is captured when it is sandwiched between two enemy pieces on opposite sides (horizontally or vertically). The board edge also counts as a hostile partner - a piece trapped against the edge by one enemy is captured.
- Safe sandwich: You may move a piece between two enemies without being captured - only a piece that ends its turn sandwiched is taken.
- The Dux: The commander cannot act as a capture partner when trapping enemy pieces - only regular soldiers may form the sandwich. The Dux itself can still be captured normally.
- Winning: The game ends when one side captures enough pieces to leave the opponent unable to make meaningful threats, or when the Dux is captured. The side with the most captures wins.
- Controls: Click a piece to select it (highlighted in lamp-gold), then click a destination square to move. The AI plays as Blue. Toggle vs AI off for a local two-player game.
About Ludus Latrunculorum
The name latrunculus is a diminutive of latro - which originally meant "mercenary soldier" before it drifted toward "bandit." So this is literally the game of little soldiers. It was played from at least the 1st century BC, when Varro described a board "marked out with a grid of lines," through to the 5th century AD, when Macrobius still wrote of it. Players scratched their grids straight into the steps of forums and basilicas and into the worn stones of frontier forts - Vindolanda, near Hadrian's Wall, has yielded six boards alone.
The pieces were not marble or obsidian but small plano-convex domes of coloured glass - thick "chocolate drops." Martial jokes about the "glass brigand," and the 1st-century Laus Pisonis describes a master at play: "battles are fought with soldiery of glass... now White blocks Black, now Black blocks White," with a crowd pressing round to watch the moves.
One of the most evocative finds is the Stanway "Doctor's grave" near Colchester (c. AD 50): a hinged maple board with thirteen blue and thirteen white glass counters laid out ready for play, buried beside the dead man's cremated remains - as if a funeral had interrupted a game mid-board.
Honesty about the rules: no complete ancient rule text survives, so everything here is scholarly reconstruction. The version you play uses rook-style moves, custodial (two-sided) capture, and a Dux commander, following R.C. Bell's classic reconstruction; Ulrich Schädler's leading alternative instead gives the pieces single-step moves and short jumps. Either way, the rules you play here are a reconstruction, not a transcription.