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The game

It is of course not possible to say what game, if any, was being played. The single most important fact about the Stanway game is that it did not involve any dice; it was therefore a strategy game which depended entirely on mental skill. Some information survives about Roman board games although there is no set of rules for any single game and nor is there a complete list of all the games that were played. If we had to guess what it might be from those that are known, then that would be a game called ludus latrunculorum, meaning `game of little robbers'. The idea of the game was to capture all of your opponent's pieces. This was done by trapping a single one of your opponent's pieces between two of your own. The Roman writer C Calpurnius Piso gives a lively account of the course of a game from which we can deduce something of how it was played:

But if you are tired after work and yet do not want to be just lazy, but play artfully then distribute the gaming pieces cleverly on the open board and lead wars with the glass warriors so that now the white one blocks the blacks and now the black one blocks the whites. But who didn't flee from you? Which stone retreated under your leadership? Which one has not -- death already near -- just defeated another enemy? Your battle line fights in a thousand ways: this one fleeing from an aggressor which he then nevertheless steals; this one, which was on the look-out, comes back on a long march; this one dares to enter a fight and deceives the enemy who is advancing in the hope of booty; this one is in a dangerous position and while it looks as if he is blocked, he actually blocks two enemies. This one has bigger aims: to quickly break though the rabble, advance through enemy lines and destroy the now defenceless walls? Meanwhile, with heated fights still going on, the soldiers are scattered, but your phalanx is still complete or maybe one or two of your warriors are missing: you win and both your hands rattle with the captured group.

The beginning of this quotation shows how part of the game involved strategically placing the pieces around the board prior to making the first move. On the face of it, such a process would rule out ludus latruculorum for the Stanway game, but some games experts take the view that this is not necessarily so and that we could at Stanway be merely seeing a variation of this game.

In truth, it seems unlikely that we will ever know what game, if any, was being played on the board. This would be hard enough had the gaming board been in a Roman grave, but it is the grave of a Briton and so the problem is even worse. Of course it may be that the pieces on the board do not represent the start of any sort of game at all, British or Roman. Burial practice involved much ritual and it could be that this was simply part of an elaborate graveside ceremony. Moreover, we need to bear in mind the possibility (remote as it is) that if the rods were used for divination, then so too might have been the gaming board. The glass counters and board were undoubtedly designed for board games but the physician may have used it as his standard stock in trade. It is hard for us to imagine how a gaming board could have been used for divination, but our outlook on life and the world around us is so different to that of the Britons 2000 years ago that we should not let this close our minds to this possibility, strange as it might seem.

On the other hand, of the eight richest graves from the site as a whole (including the chambers), three contained gaming counters. This is a high proportion. Could all three gaming boards at Stanway really have been used for divination? This seems unlikely and so would support the most obvious conclusion that the doctor's gaming board was primarily for pleasure.

[The reconstructed game]