Romans liked to play all sorts of games. Not just children but adults too.

Roman grown-ups were very fond of sports & games they could gamble on. Romans were very fond of going to the Bath house each day to meet and have a chat. This was a place where they could exercise, train in sports, and/or later relax in hot steam rooms where they would chat and play games, sometimes gambling on the results.

Roman soldiers liked to play games. One of their favourites was a board game “Ludus Latruncularum”, or “the soldiers game”. This was a bit like Draughts and was played on a grid 12 squares by 8. If they didn’t have a board sometimes the soldiers would just scratch the grid on a tile or some stone and use pebbles for counters. These get found in all sorts of funny places. One of these grids can be found on a stone built into the corner tower of Vindolanda fort on Hadrians Wall, where the men must have been playing games during spare time (tea breaks?) while they were building it.

Roman soldiers also liked to play dice games. They probably also liked to gamble on them. Some of them even cheated too!! There was a dice found at Vindolanda that had been “loaded” by weighting the number 1 so that it always fell on Number 6. Was it lost or was it hidden? Did the owner get caught and the cheating dice get thrown away, or did the others thump him too much for him to get it back from where he hid it?

Children played games much like children today. Lots of these games were copying the grown-up world, playing the parts of kings, generals and soldiers. Sometimes they played with toys, sometimes with dice and board games.

There are lots of scenes of children that have been found playing games, some on wall paintings and some carved on children’s stone coffins. Some have been seen playing with hobby-horses, balls, nuts, dice, and others playing sport or hide-and-seek. Some Roman Authors mention games, but the exact rules are not known, so a lot of it is guess work.