Finding suggests that ‘blocking games’ were played in Europe centuries earlier than realized.
Microscopic analysis of patterns on a stone (digital model) suggests that the object was a game board. Credit: W. Crist et al./Antiquity ( CC-BY-4.0 )
A mysterious ancient Roman object found in what is now the southern tip of the Netherlands has long been thought to be some sort of board game. With the help of artificial-intelligence simulations, Walter Crist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his collaborators have now found1 that it was most likely a ‘blocking game’, a type of board game that was not known to exist in Europe before the Middl e Ages.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00413-2
References Crist, W. et al. Antiquity https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10264 (2026). Download references
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