Lost Games · Field Reconstruction 01

Pente Grammai

Five lines. Ten counters. One sacred line—and no surviving rulebook.

A five-line game associated in ancient imagery with heroes including Achilles and Ajax — and no surviving rules. Three people have completed the missing pieces in three different ways. You can play all three and say which is the better game. That is a question about play, not about history: no amount of playing can recover what the ancient rules actually were.

Play all three versions Examine the evidence

Free to playNo account requiredThree versionsPublic play test

Modern visual reconstruction — not an artefact image, and not the board of any one version. Each version is drawn to its own geometry in the game itself.

The three versions

Three ways to finish an unfinished game

The evidence gives five lines, five counters each, a middle line called sacred, and an association with dice. It does not give a starting position, a route, a capture rule or a way to win. Two scholars and this project have each completed those gaps differently. All three are playable here, presented as equals — we are not putting one forward as the likeliest, because the evidence does not support ranking them.

All three are played on the same board. What differs is the rules.
The ten circles are the only playing positions The sacred line: the only place counters may share

Known: five lines, five counters each, a middle line called sacred, and dice. Every surviving table puts the playing positions at the ends of the lines, one counter to each — so a five-line board has ten. Invented: the route between them, and everything in the table below.

Every rule below is a modern completion. None of it survives from antiquity.
Rule Schädler 2009 Kidd 2017 Sacred Departure v0.8
Where counters start On the board — one on each of your five line ends Off the board On the board — one on each of your five line ends
Coming into play Nothing to enter; the board is already full At your own corner Nothing to enter. A counter knocked off is sent home to a free line
A position holds One counter — and it blocks whoever arrives next One, or any number of your own: two or more form a yoke A stack of one colour, gathered along the line; an opponent’s line bars you
Capture None. The board is the obstacle Land on a lone enemy and it starts again Land on a lone enemy and it is sent home
The sacred line The one place counters may gather A safe goal, entered only from your left A refuge, not a goal. Takes both colours; nothing can be taken there
Why leave it You are forced to. If a move is legal you must play it, even that one You choose to — to strike an exposed enemy You must. Sheltering makes no progress, so you cannot win from there
Winning All five gathered on the sacred line All five on the sacred line All five on opponent-side endpoints; more than one may share an endpoint
Typical match about 33 turns about 101 turns about 39 turns

The row that matters is why leave it. An ancient proverb describes moving a counter away from the sacred line, and these are three different answers to why anyone would.

1

Schädler 2009

Attributed scholarly reconstruction
How it plays
A race with no capture at all. Every ordinary point holds one counter and blocks whoever arrives next, so the board itself is the obstacle. Counters begin on the endpoints of your own side and travel anticlockwise; the sacred line is the one place counters may gather together. Win by collecting all five there.
Why leave the sacred line?
Because you are forced to. Movement is compulsory where a legal move exists, so a counter gathered on the far sacred endpoint is still movable and can be dragged back off the line against your wishes. This is Schädler’s answer to the ancient proverb.
What is Schädler’s, and what is ours
The race, the blocking, the collection point and the all-five finish follow his published reconstruction. The exact ten-point circuit, the treatment of an exact finish and what happens when no move is legal are ours — his 2009 paper could not be obtained, and those choices are labelled in the game itself.

2,000 seeded matches · 100% completed · mean 33.3 turns · no captures

Play Schädler 2009 →

2

Kidd 2017

Attributed scholarly reconstruction
How it plays
A race with a fight in it. Counters start off the board and enter at your own corner. A counter standing alone can be knocked off and must start again; two or more of your counters on a point form a yoke your opponent cannot land on. The sacred line can be entered only from your own left-hand side.
Why leave the sacred line?
Because you choose to. A counter on the sacred line is safe and would normally stay, but stepping off lets you knock an exposed enemy counter away. Kidd’s paper exists to argue exactly this.
What is Kidd’s, and what is ours
The circuit length, the entry corner, the holy-line entrance, the knock-off and the yoke are all his, set out in his published rules. Whether an exact throw is needed to reach the sacred line, whether entering takes priority, and whether movement is compulsory are ours — he does not say, and the game labels each one.
Kidd’s own doubt
He concedes that no surviving image shows two counters yoked on a line, and defends the rule on the grounds that the game would not work otherwise. Schädler rejects it, pointing out that every source shows a single circle at each line end for a single stone.

2,000 seeded matches · 100% completed · mean 101 turns · 10.5 captures per match

Play Kidd 2017 →

3

Sacred Departure v0.8

Our own proposal
How it plays
Your five counters begin on the five ends of your own side. You win when all five occupy opponent-side endpoints; more than one counter may share an endpoint. Counters gather along a line; a line your opponent holds bars you, and a counter standing alone can be knocked off and sent home.
Why leave the sacred line?
Because it is shelter, not a destination. The sacred line takes both colours at once and nothing can be taken there — but standing on it wins you nothing, so you must leave to cross.
Everything is on the board
A clay table with ten cavities and five plain counters a side records exactly one thing: where the counters are. Earlier versions of ours tracked how far each counter had travelled — something no player of the real object could have known. This version keeps no state you cannot see.
Why the counters stack
If a counter could only ever sit in an end cavity, the line between the cavities would do nothing, and a maker wanting ten positions would have cut ten cups rather than five lines with a cup at each end. So counters gather along the line. It also explains why the sacred line is the exception: every line takes a stack, but only the sacred line takes both colours. Kidd argued for stacking from playability and Schädler rejected it; this is a different argument, from the shape of the object — and it is ours, offered as an argument rather than a finding.
What earlier attempts taught us
Our first version let both players enter on the same square and capture freely, producing a forced reset lock: counters knocked each other off the shared entry indefinitely and not one match in a thousand ever finished. Three later ones each invented a reward for leaving the sacred line, and a simple player used all three exactly zero times. Then two entry rules had to be discarded for being unfollowable. The common fault was ours throughout: we kept inventing state the board could not hold, and rules the counters could not carry.
What the testing shows
With one counter to a cavity — the rule as usually read — the game becomes a treadmill: 52 knock-offs a match, and one game in fourteen never finishes. Letting counters gather along the line settles it at about 39 turns with 7.5 knock-offs. That is independent support for Kidd’s reasoning, reached from a different direction.

2,000 seeded matches · 100% completed · mean 39 turns · 7.5 knock-offs per match · who begins is decided by the throw

Play Sacred Departure v0.8 →

Evidence

Where archaeology ends

Known — supported by evidence

  • Five lines, with a middle one called the sacred line. Boards of three, nine and eleven lines also survive.
  • Each player had as many counters as the board had lines — five on a five-line board.
  • The playing positions are the ends of the lines. Every surviving table marks them with a circle or a cavity holding a single counter.
  • Dice belong with the game. A clay die was found with the Vari board.
  • Leaving the sacred line was proverbial, and described as a move made in desperation.
  • No unambiguous complete ancient rules survive.

Inferred — argued in scholarship

  • Two opposing players, moving counters from line to line around the board.
  • The sacred line was the goal, and the one place counters could stand together.
  • Isolated counters may have been knocked away — Kidd’s explanation of the proverb.
  • Movement was compulsory, even off the sacred line — Schädler’s explanation of the same proverb.
  • The surviving tables are funerary votives or models rather than playing equipment. No actual board has come down to us.

Modern hypothesis — invented to complete a game

  • The route between the positions, and which way it runs.
  • How many dice, and how a throw may be spent.
  • What blocks, what captures, and what is safe.
  • Why a counter would ever leave the sacred line.
  • The exact victory condition.

Every invented rule is versioned and open to revision as play data arrives. The three versions differ only here, in tier III.

We do not claim to have recovered the ancient rules. Public play tests whether this equipment and evidence boundary can sustain a coherent living game, and which of three modern completions makes the better one. Popularity or elegance cannot prove that a rule is ancient.

Sources

Read the scholarship

  • Ulrich Schädler — “Pente Grammai — the Ancient Greek Board Game Five Lines” Research publication · accessed 14 July 2026 Supports: the five-line identification, the equipment tradition, and the position that a precise lost rule cannot be recovered. We have not been able to obtain this paper — the proceedings are out of print — so our implementation of his version works from his later published rules and from secondary descriptions, and says so in the game.
  • Stephen Kidd — “Pente Grammai and the ‘Holy Line’” Board Game Studies Journal · accessed 14 July 2026 Supports: the strategic importance of the sacred line and the argued knocking-away of isolated pieces.
  • Locus Ludi — “Reconstructing a lost game” Open-access reconstruction discussion · accessed 14 July 2026 Supports: the modern naming, five pieces per player, and the methodological limits of reconstruction.
  • Maria Chidiroglou, Ulrich Schädler and Stine Schierup — “Archaic Greek Terracotta Gaming Tables Revisited” Pallas 119 (2022), open access · accessed 26 July 2026 Supports: the line-end positions holding one counter each, the range of line counts across surviving tables, the central marker on the middle line, and the reading of these objects as funerary votives rather than playing equipment.
  • Agathias — Anthologia Palatina 9.482, on the Emperor Zeno’s game Paton, Loeb Classical Library (1917) · accessed 26 July 2026 Supports: a paired-and-unpaired system in a later Greek race game, the evidence behind Kidd’s reading of exposed counters. It is a different game, seven centuries later, and shares no board vocabulary with the five lines.
  • Aristotle — Politics 1253a Standard text · accessed 26 July 2026 Supports: the word Kidd builds on, used of a counter “desirous of war”. Aristotle names no game — he says only “in board games” — so the identification with this one is an argument, not a citation.

Findings

What public play has shown

Simulation results so far. These say whether a version produces a game that ends — nothing more. Player findings will be added here with the version, sample size and limitations once the public test has run.

2,000 seeded matches per version · seeds 1–2,000 · 400-turn cap · identical simple opponent · reproducible from source
VersionMatches that endedMean turnsCaptures per match
Schädler 2009100%33.3none — no capture rule
Kidd 2017100%101.010.5
Sacred Departure v0.8100%38.67.5

Popularity, speed or elegance cannot make a rule ancient. A version ending reliably only means it is playable.

Field Edition

A physical edition, if you want one

Concept · not yet on sale

We are testing interest in a physical Field Edition before anything is produced. The concept:

  • Folding five-line board
  • Ten counters
  • One die
  • Evidence and rules booklet
  • Printed version record
If this existed, what would feel fair?

The interest test opens with the experiment — responses are anonymous, nothing is a preorder, and no payment is taken.