Long before backgammon had a name, Romans were hunched over a three-row grid of letters and symbols, rattling a handful of dice and racing their pieces toward the far edge of the board. They called it ludus duodecim scriptorum — "the game of twelve lines" (or twelve writings), usually shortened to XII scripta. It was one of the most popular tables games of the ancient Mediterranean, and it sits squarely in the family tree between the Egyptian race games and the backgammon we still play today.
It is also a game whose rules we do not fully have. What follows separates what the archaeology actually tells us from what modern scholars have carefully reconstructed — a distinction that matters, because the honest version of this story is more interesting than a made-up one.
A game carved into the floors of the empire
The earliest clear reference to XII scripta comes from the poet Ovid, who mentions it in his Ars Amatoria, written somewhere between roughly 1 BCE and 8 CE. From there the trail is physical: boards turn up scratched and carved across the Roman world, from marble steps in the Forum to tavern tables and bathhouse benches. This was not a game reserved for one class. Senators, soldiers, and shopkeepers all seem to have played it, often with coins riding on the outcome.
What makes XII scripta boards instantly recognizable is that so many of them are inscribed. The 36 playing spaces were frequently replaced by six words of six letters each — a neat fit, since six sixes make thirty-six. Some are proverbs, some are tavern menus, and a surprising number are jokes aimed at the other player. One of the most famous surviving boards reads, in three tidy lines:
- VENARI · LAVARI
- LVDERE · RIDERE
- OCC · EST · VIVERE
— roughly, "To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh — now that is to live!" Others are blunter. A board recorded in Rome snaps at a losing opponent to get up and clear off because he doesn't know how to play. Historians have even suggested that dressing a gambling board up as a wall of harmless mottoes may have helped players look respectable during one of Rome's periodic crackdowns on betting.
The board: three rows of twelve
Nearly every surviving board shares the same skeleton: three parallel rows, each divided into twelve spaces, for 36 points in total. That layout is almost certainly where the name comes from — the "twelve lines" counted across a row. The two long outer rows formed the main racetrack; the middle row acted as a shared lane the pieces passed along.
The equipment was simple and portable: three six-sided dice and a set of distinguishable markers for each side — often plain discs, pebbles, or glass counters, with one player's pieces told apart from the other's by color. (The Roman glass die shown above is the kind of everyday object that would have sat beside one of these boards.) Because the gear was so ordinary, a scratched grid and a pocketful of dice were all anyone needed to play.
How it was played — as far as we can tell
Here is the honest caveat. No ancient rulebook for XII scripta survives. We have the boards, the dice, offhand literary mentions, and one tantalizing "beginner's" board whose spaces are marked with a running sequence of letters — which is how scholars worked out the likely direction of travel in the first place. Everything below is a modern reconstruction, built mainly by Roland G. Austin (whose 1934–35 papers on Roman board games remain the starting point) and H. J. R. Murray in his 1952 A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess, with later refinements by researchers such as Ulrich Schädler. Where the record is silent, these scholars reasonably filled the gaps by borrowing from the game's better-documented descendant, tabula. Treat the ruleset as a credible best guess, not gospel.
With that understood, a typical reconstructed game runs like this:
- Two players, 15 pieces each. The pieces enter the board and race along the track of points, each side travelling its own route through the three rows.
- Roll three dice. On your turn you throw all three and use the numbers to advance your pieces. Each die can move a different piece, or the pips can be combined to drive a single piece further along the track. You generally must use every die you can.
- Stacks are safe; lone pieces are not. Two or more of your pieces on the same point hold it — the opponent cannot land there and must go around. But a single piece sitting alone is vulnerable: an opponent who lands exactly on it sends it back to the start, to re-enter and run the gauntlet again.
- Bearing off. Once all of a player's pieces have reached the final stretch of the track, they begin removing them from the board, which usually calls for exact dice throws. The first player to clear all 15 pieces wins.
Played this way, XII scripta feels like a slower, longer-range cousin of backgammon — three dice instead of two, a bigger board, and games that could genuinely stretch past an hour. The tension is the same one every tables player knows: do you play safe and stack up, or push a lone piece forward and dare your opponent to catch it?
From twelve lines to two: the road to backgammon
XII scripta did not vanish so much as streamline. Over the later Roman centuries the middle row quietly fell out of use, leaving a board of just two rows of twelve — 24 points in all. That trimmed-down version is tabula, the game an epigram attributed to the emperor Zeno (reigning 476–491 CE) describes in painful detail after a run of bad luck. Tabula, in turn, is the direct structural ancestor of modern backgammon, whose 24-point board and race-and-capture rhythm you can trace straight back through this line.
So when you set up a backgammon board today, you're looking at the ghost of XII scripta with one row erased. If you'd like to follow that lineage forward, we've written companion pieces on how to play tabula, the two-row Roman successor, and on the long history and rules of backgammon itself.
XII scripta is a reminder that the games on our shelves are rarely inventions out of nowhere. They're the survivors of a very long game of telephone — and sometimes, as with those joking Roman boards, the players left us notes.
At Ancient.Games we handcraft the living descendant of XII scripta — an heirloom-quality wooden backgammon board — so you can pick up a 2,000-year-old race game and play it tonight. Explore our full collection of handmade ancient and historical games at Ancient.Games.
Image: Roman glass die, 1st–2nd century CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession no. 74.51.332), Open Access / public domain.