For ancient Romans, many of the gestures now associated with Valentine’s Day would be unfamiliar, if not completely puzzling. Love and desire were not confined to a single day, nor expressed through standardised tokens of romance. There were no cards written (or forgotten), flowers purchased (at inflated prices) or eateries teaming with lovers. Instead, intimacy was negotiated through daily social encounters, leisure activities and moments of shared experience.
Ancient evidence – texts, art, and material remains – show that games were everywhere in the Roman world. We’ve been studying ancient board games together since 2018 and our work has found that games brought ancient people together in many different situations, including ones that encouraged closeness, flirtatious competition and prolonged interaction. Often these games, played with simple equipment, could be deeply meaningful and memorable for those who played together.
Roman games included games of strategy played without dice, such as ludus latrunculorum (“the game of the little soldiers”). They also played games which mixed skill and chance by using dice (even though playing dice games was often prohibited by law, like ludus duodecim scriptorum (“the game of 12 lines”), an ancestor of modern backgammon.
There are lessons to be learnt from ancient approaches to these love games. Today, people who are dating report dissatisfying or even dangerous gaps between romantic expectations and reality, as apps and screens compress intimacy into emojis or fleeting swipes.
The 1st-century Roman poet, Ovid, explains the importance of play for attracting and keeping a lover in his poetic manual, The Art of Love. One of his top tips is to play boardgames, and, importantly, to play to lose.
Ovid tells men: “If she is gaming and throwing the ivory dice with her hand, throw amiss and move your throws amiss”. In other words, try and play badly, so that the girl you are trying to charm wins.
Ovid also suggests that a woman in search of a lover should learn how to play, and “should know the throws of the dice, and your powers, O flung counter”, as knowledge of gaming with dice and counters was a key skill for hopeful lovers.
Playing for love, according to Ovid, is never purely about winning: it is about connection, attention, and spending time together.
You can see the ways that people in the ancient world used games to flirt in images too. A bronze mirror from Praeneste (modern Palestrina), an Italian town outside Rome and probably dating to the 2nd or 3rd century BC, shows a young couple sitting close together and wearing rather limited clothing while playing a board game. This game is possibly a larger variant of a dice-based one known as pente grammai (five lines), in which players compete to position their pieces on the centre-most line.
British Museum Trustees
To help us understand how much the game is bringing them together, there is a useful dialogue above their heads. She’s saying something like, “I shall beat you,” to which he replies flirtatiously, “I expect you will.” So, the game is less about winning than about what happens around it: the proximity, the banter, and the shared moment of play that brings the couple together.
Returning to the present day, board games offer a striking counterpoint to many of today’s expressions of intimacy. Unlike digital forms of interaction, board games require presence: players gather around a shared surface, negotiate rules, take turns, and respond to one another spontaneously.
Board games structure attention and time, encouraging sustained engagement rather than fleeting exchange, and create opportunities for conversation, competition, and collaboration. In doing so, they bring people together in a shared social experience – one that foregrounds presence, interaction, and mutual awareness.
As is often the case, experience brings the theory to life. For eight years we have been researching ancient board games, so in a different way they brought us together. Somewhere along the line, we got married. Perhaps the Romans were on to something, after all.
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