Long before backgammon boards folded into leather cases and doubling cubes clattered across felt, Romans were bent over almost the same board, cursing almost the same dice. The game was called tabula, and behind it stood an older relative with a mouthful of a name: ludus duodecim scriptorum, the "game of twelve markings." Together they form the Roman branch of the great tables family — the sprawling lineage of race games that eventually produced the backgammon we play today.
This post is about that Roman branch specifically: what we can honestly say we know, what the emperors and poets left us, and how you can sit down and play a faithful reconstruction tonight.
Two names, one lineage
Ludus duodecim scriptorum — often shortened by modern writers to "XII scripta" — means roughly the game of the twelve lines or twelve inscriptions. Its surviving boards are unmistakable: three parallel rows of twelve spaces, thirty-six in all. Many stone examples replace the plain markers with letters, so that the rows spell out little six-letter mottoes and jokes. Those inscriptions are why some boards read almost like graffiti — Roman players had a sense of humor about their gambling.
Tabula, literally just "the board" or "the table," appears to be a later, streamlined version of the same idea. The best reconstruction holds that the middle row of twelve was dropped, leaving two rows of twelve points — twenty-four in total, exactly the count you see on a backgammon board. If that reading is right, tabula is not a cousin of backgammon so much as a direct ancestor with the same skeleton.
What the evidence actually shows
Here honesty matters, because this is a history niche and the sources are thin. A few things are reasonably well documented:
- The games were genuinely Roman and genuinely popular. Boards are scratched into the steps of forums, the floors of basilicas, and the benches of bathhouses across the empire. This was a game of the street and the tavern, not just the villa.
- They used three dice, not two. This is one of the clearest differences from modern backgammon, which settled on two dice much later.
- Each player commanded fifteen pieces. That number carries straight through to backgammon.
- The poet Ovid references board games of this kind in his Ars Amatoria (around the turn of the first millennium), and archaeologists have turned up marked boards such as one at Kibyra in what is now southwestern Turkey.
And here is what we do not have: a Roman rulebook. Not one. Nobody in antiquity wrote down, step by step, how to play. The classicist R. G. Austin, whose 1934 studies "Roman Board Games" remain a standard reference, was candid that the specifics are recovered by inference, not preserved by instruction. When you read a confident, tidy ruleset for XII scripta online, you are reading a modern reconstruction — a good-faith one, but a reconstruction.
The emperor who rolled badly
The single most valuable clue we have comes from an unlikely source: a losing move by an emperor. Zeno, who ruled the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in the late fifth century, was mid-game at tabula when a dice roll shattered a strong position and scattered his pieces. A sixth-century writer, Agathias of Myrina, preserved the moment as a Greek epigram, laying out the board position in enough detail that scholars could work backward from it.
That epigram is the closest thing we have to a snapshot of a real Roman tables game in progress. In the nineteenth century the French scholar Becq de Fouquières used it to reconstruct how tabula was likely played, and later game historians — including H. J. R. Murray — built on that work. It is a remarkable piece of detective work. It is also, by its nature, an interpretation of one man's unlucky turn, so treat the details below as the best available reconstruction rather than gospel.
How to play tabula (a reconstructed version)
If you own a backgammon set, you already have everything you need. Here is a commonly played reconstruction:
- The board: two rows of twelve points, twenty-four in all — a standard backgammon board works perfectly.
- The pieces: fifteen per player.
- The dice: three dice, thrown together each turn.
- Entry and direction: in this reconstruction, both players move in the same direction around the board (conventionally anticlockwise), rather than toward each other as in modern backgammon. Pieces enter and travel through all four quarters before coming home.
- Moving: use the three dice to advance your pieces, splitting the pips among different pieces or piling them onto one, much as in backgammon.
- Capturing: a point held by a single enemy piece — a "singleton" or "blot" — is vulnerable. Land on it and that piece is sent off the board; its owner must bring it back into play before doing anything else. A point held by two or more pieces is safe.
- Winning: once all your pieces reach the final quarter, you begin bearing them off. The first player to clear all fifteen from the board wins.
You will notice how much of this survived into backgammon: fifteen pieces, blots and hits, safe points, bearing off to win. What changed on the way to the modern game was real but limited — two dice instead of three, players running in opposite directions, and, much later, the doubling cube, which is a twentieth-century American invention and has nothing to do with Rome.
Why the honest version is the better story
It would be easy to slap a "5,000 years old" sticker on tabula and call it a day. The truth is more interesting. What we have is a game we can watch Romans playing on tavern walls and temple steps, whose equipment we can hold in our hands, and whose one detailed surviving position happens to be an emperor's blunder — reconstructed by scholars centuries later into rules you can still enjoy. The gaps are part of the artifact. Knowing where the record stops is what separates a history worth telling from a tall tale.
Play a few games of this reconstruction and modern backgammon will never feel quite the same. You will recognize it as the polished descendant of something a legionary might have scratched into a marble bench two thousand years ago.
At Ancient.Games we handcraft the living descendant of tabula — a solid wooden backgammon board built to be played on for a lifetime. Explore our collection of handcrafted ancient games and bring the Roman tavern home.
Image: Roman fresco of dice players from the Osteria della Via di Mercurio, Pompeii (1st century CE); public domain via Wikimedia Commons.