On a black-figure water jar painted in Athens around 510 BCE, two of the greatest warriors of the Iliad are doing something surprisingly ordinary: they are hunched over a game board, utterly absorbed. Achilles and Ajax, spears still in hand, lean in across a small table while the goddess Athena looks on. The scene was so beloved that Greek vase-painters repeated it for generations. The game that could make Homer's heroes forget the Trojan War was petteia — the ancient Greek world's great contest of pure strategy.
What "petteia" actually means
The Greek word petteía (πεττεία) comes from pessoí (πεσσοί), meaning "pebbles" or "counters" — the little playing pieces themselves. Strictly speaking, petteia was not one single game but a whole family of board games played with these counters. What united them was what they did not use: dice. The Greeks drew a sharp line between petteia, games of skill and position, and kubeía (κυβεία), games of chance played with dice or the knucklebones we covered in an earlier post on dice and astragaloi. Petteia was the thinking person's game — no luck to blame, only your own planning.
Ancient writers mention several variants, and one of the best-documented was nicknamed póleis (πόλεις), "cities" — a hint that players may have pictured their pieces as citizens or soldiers holding ground.
A game woven through Greek literature
Few ancient games left as deep a mark on the written record. The earliest reference comes in Homer's Odyssey: when the poem opens, Penelope's arrogant suitors are lounging outside Odysseus's hall, playing at pessoi to pass the time. Greek tradition went further and credited the game's invention to the hero Palamedes, who was said to have devised it (along with dice) to keep the Greek army sane during the long siege of Troy. That origin tale is legend, not history — but it shows how far back the Greeks themselves imagined the game reaching.
Philosophers loved it as a metaphor. In Plato's Phaedrus, the Egyptian god Theuth is named as the inventor of "number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, and also petteia and dice" — placing the game beside writing itself among the great inventions of civilization. Aristotle, in the Politics, compares a person with no city to "an isolated piece in petteia" — stranded, unprotected, easily taken. For an image like that to work, Aristotle had to assume every reader already knew exactly how a lone piece got captured.
What we know about the rules — and what we don't
Here is the honest part, and it matters for a game this old: the complete ancient rules of petteia are lost. No Greek rulebook survives. What we have are scattered clues — a line in a philosopher, a joke in a comedy, and above all a description by the 2nd-century-CE scholar Julius Pollux, whose Onomasticon sketches the "cities" variant.
From those fragments, scholars agree on a few points. Petteia was played on a gridded board marked out with lines. Two players each commanded an equal force of counters. And the signature method of capture was custodial capture: you took an enemy piece by trapping it between two of your own on opposite sides. Beyond that — how the pieces moved, how many there were, precisely how you won — the details are reconstructions, and careful historians (H. J. R. Murray in his landmark A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess, R. C. Bell, and more recently Ulrich Schädler) are candid that modern playable versions are informed guesses, not recovered originals.
From Greek pebbles to Roman soldiers
Petteia did not stay in Greece. Most historians see it as the direct ancestor — or at least the close cousin — of the Roman ludus latrunculorum, the "game of little soldiers," which used the very same two-sided flanking capture. We told that story in our guide to latrunculi, another game whose rules survive only in fragments. The idea at the heart of both — surround your opponent to capture him — is one of the oldest in all of gaming, and it still powers living board games today, from the Norse tafl family to countless modern abstracts.
How to play petteia at home (a modern reconstruction)
Because the ancient rules are lost, the version below is a modern reconstruction — the kind hobbyists and historians use to bring the game back to the table. Treat it as a playable tribute, not a recovered original.
- Board: an 8×8 grid works well (ancient boards came in several sizes). An ordinary chessboard is perfect.
- Pieces: each player takes 8 counters of one color, lined up along their own back row.
- Moving: on your turn, move any one piece in a straight line — horizontally or vertically — like a rook in chess, as far as the path is clear. (Simpler one-square-step versions are also common; agree which you're using before you start.)
- Capturing: you capture an enemy piece when you move so that it is sandwiched between two of your pieces on opposite sides — directly left-and-right, or above-and-below. The trapped piece is removed from the board. You may safely move your own piece into a gap between two enemies; only a flanking move completed by your opponent counts as a capture.
- Winning: play until one side has lost most of its force or can no longer make a useful move. The last commander standing wins.
It plays faster than chess and rewards patience: you are always watching for the moment an opponent's piece drifts into a square where you can quietly close the jaws on it.
Want a surround-and-capture battle game whose rules you can actually follow to the last move? The same ancient idea lives on in the Norse tafl games we handcraft — explore our Hnefatafl "Viking chess" boards and the rest of our strategy games at Ancient.Games.
Image: Terracotta hydria (water jar) attributed to the Leagros Group, Greek, Attic, ca. 510 BCE, showing Achilles and Ajax at their game. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1956 (56.171.29); Open Access / public domain.