Duodecim Scripta & Tabula The Roman race games and their road to backgammon

Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum — shortened by modern scholars to duodecim scripta — is conventionally translated "the game of twelve lines." Ulrich Schädler, however, argues persuasively that scripta here means marks, not lines, and that the name refers to the twelve-dot maximum available on two cuboid dice. The grammarian Nonius confirms this: he glosses the term as puncta tesserarum, "the spots of the dice-cubes." The game was a backgammon-style race for two players using fifteen pieces each, moved according to throws of three six-sided dice.

Physical evidence is abundant and geographically wide. Boards are incised into temple steps at Ephesus and Aphrodisias, scratched onto forum paving stones in Rome, and cut into the walls of military installations across Britain, the Levant, and North Africa. The game's spread mirrors the Roman legions themselves.

The game fell out of fashion during the first century CE, replaced by a variant called tabula, which reorganised the board into four sets of six points rather than the original six sets of six. Both games share the same basic mechanics: dice-driven movement, blot-hitting, and bearing-off — a family of rules that has remained essentially unchanged in backgammon today.

Surviving duodecim scripta boards take two main forms. The older type, found on bronze mirrors and stone tables from the Hellenistic period, marks the playing points with simple incised lines. A bronze mirror from Italy (c. 3rd–2nd century BCE, now in the British Museum, Room 69) bears one of the earliest known examples, with a couple apparently playing the game and an archaic Latin caption that reads opeinod devincam ted — "I believe I'll beat you."

The later Roman form replaces geometric marks with six-letter Latin words or phrases, each letter marking one point in a group of six. The most celebrated example, excavated from a tavern near the Praetorian camp in Rome and now in the National Museum of Rome, doubles as a dinner menu. A similar board from Ephesus in the Ephesus Museum (c. 100 BCE) shows the word-marking layout clearly.

Schädler's key insight is that on these inscribed boards, the twelve "lines" run vertically, cutting across the horizontal words — not along the rows of letters as one might first assume. This gives the correct count of twelve playing columns per half of the board.

No ancient rulebook survives for either game. The reconstruction depends on physical boards, scattered literary references, and — for tabula specifically — a detailed account of Emperor Zeno's famously unlucky dice roll in an epigram by Agathias (c. 530 CE), which describes the game's mechanics in enough detail to confirm blot-hitting and re-entry rules nearly identical to backgammon.

The scholarly consensus, drawing on Murray (1952), Bell (1979), Schädler (1995, 1998), and Finkel (2005), reconstructs duodecim scripta as follows: each player has fifteen pieces, moved by throws of three cubic dice. The three numbers may be used individually or in combination to move one, two, or three pieces respectively, but each piece must be able to land on its intermediate stopping point. Pieces enter the board on the middle row (the "A" zone in Murray's lettering scheme), race through the outer rows, and are borne off from the final row.

Schädler cautions that the direction of travel — whether both players moved in the same direction or in backgammon's characteristic contraflow — cannot be confirmed from surviving evidence. The Botermans reconstruction (both same direction) is the most widely reproduced but Schädler flags it as unverified.

The Roman race games did not emerge from nothing. Schädler's identification of a 3rd–2nd century BCE Italian bronze mirror — previously misclassified as an early duodecim scripta board — as a variant of the Greek pente grammai (five lines) suggests a direct line of descent. The Greek game's blot-hitting mechanic, attested in Aristotle and confirmed by Kidd (2017), provided the fundamental strategic vocabulary that duodecim scripta inherited and passed to tabula and ultimately backgammon.

The sixth-century CE Persian game Nard — documented in the Sasanian text Wizārishn ī chatrang and already playable in our Arcade — is either a parallel development or a Persian adaptation of tabula. By the time of the Arab conquests, the game was known as nard across the Islamic world and reached medieval Europe as tables, the Old English term that survives in "backgammon tables" today.

The richness of the physical record for the Roman tables games is unmatched among ancient board games. Boards appear in contexts ranging from elite burials to soldiers' barracks — evidence of a game that genuinely crossed social strata.