Ludus latrunculorum

Latrunculi (Latin for "Soldiers ", "mercenary "), even Ludus Latrunculorum or simply latrones, was the name of a Roman board game. It was a game for two people and was played without dice. Both sides received the same number of tiles that differed in color from each other. The pieces all had the same value. Latrunculi was the most common and most popular game of the Romans and was very appreciated by the Legion as a pastime. The Latin diminutive latrunculus of latro originally meant " mercenaries ", " Soldier " and later became the pejorative meaning of " Bandit ".

Latrunculi itself is not an invention of the Romans, but came from the Greeks, who called this game Polis ( ancient Greek for " city ").

At the time of the Empire gambling were banned in Rome. Since it arrived in Latrunculi solely on the mind and skill, it could also be played in public places. Even today, therefore find numerous Latrunculi playing fields on the flagstones of seats or steps carved.

Game rules

There were no hard rules for Latrunculi, so you can not see exactly now how the game was played. Since there was a lack of a set of rules, they played it on different sized pitches with 8 times 7, 8 × 8 or 9 times 10 fields.

For a long time seemed the rules to be quite lost, until, the head of the Swiss Game Museum in La Tour -de- Peilz and co-editor of the journal Board Game Studies, could be largely reconstructed by careful study of the sources of the historian Ulrich Schadler (1958 *).

In Latrunculi it was to beat all of the opponent's pieces or lock him up so that he could not move. Who the first to succeed, the game had won.

Related Games

According to Schadler, there could be a link to give to the Egyptian game Seega, also Ceega and Egyptian Siga. The games will be combined for group games Latrunculi or Petteia, including the chess variant Shogi.