The Ludii Games Database: A Resource for Computational and Cultural Research on Traditional Board Games

As commercial tabletop and video games become increasingly popular throughout the world, traditional board games are becoming a form of endangered intangible cultural heritage, and in many places what were once widely played games have largely been abandoned. The Digital Ludeme Project applies artificial intelligence and computational techniques to the incompletely documented rules of traditional board games from 3500 BCE until the present to help preserve accurate knowledge of these games. The project engages with the historiography of knowledge about traditional games, determining which parts of the rules are provided by various textual, archaeological, artistic, and ethnographic sources. To document this knowledge and situate it geographically and chronologically, the Ludii Games Database provides the first comprehensive and rigorous Open Access database of scholarship on the global history of board games. Furthermore, the database is used as a source for data for the Ludii general game system, which makes the games playable and provides the analytical tools that will be used in future reconstruction work. Finally, the database may also serve as a reference tool for scholars pursuing research on games-related topics.