Last week the game was Hnefatafl, which likely had its roots in the game of Petteia.
Petteia is a game which is thought to have been around since about the year 100, but for which the actual rules are only speculated at today.
“The Greek game Petteia (aka Poleis, Polis, City, Cities, Pessoi, or Pebbles) is played on boards of varying sizes with black and white stones initially lined up on opposite sides,” details www.aerobiologicalengineering.com. “The objective is to capture or immobilize an opponent’s stones by sandwiching them between two others.
”This military style game that Plato called Petteia (meaning pebbles, stones, or pawns) is also sometimes called ‘Poleis’ or ‘Polis’ which means ‘city’ or ‘cities’ although these terms may have actually referred to the board itself, or the spaces on the board. Aristotle and Polybius also called this game Petteia, although some other writers used different names for it, including ‘pessoi’ (pebbles).
“Some later Greeks seem to have used the name Petteia to refer to Tabula, leading some modern sources suggest that Petteia may have been the name of a class of board games. In ‘The Republic’ Plato compares Socrates’ victims to “bad Petteia players, who are finally cornered and made unable to move by clever ones.” In the same work Plato quite clearly tells us that Petteia involves long training if skill is to be achieved. Polybius said of Scipio that “he destroyed many men without a battle by cutting them off and blockading them, like a clever petteia-player.” Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, wrote “a citizen without a state may be compared to an isolated piece in a game of Petteia”. The game is said to be very similar to the Egyptian game Siga (or Seega).
There are “Greek Attic vases with images of Ajax and Achilles playing what is most probably Petteia. Although some scholars dispute that this game was played by these heroes, a fragment of a playing board was found in the excavations of Troy. The Trojan War was fought from about 1154 to 1164 BCE, a time during which board games were already popular in Egypt. In fact, at least nine Greek vases and one cup have been found that show variations of the image of Achilles and Ajax playing Pettiea while dressed in armor. It is believed that a lost epic poem described this situation, in which the heroes were so absorbed in the game they forgot about a critical battle that was raging.”
The same website delves into the believed rules.
“In the basic version, an 8 X 8 board was used. They were lined up in the eight squares on each player’s side. Similar complete or nearly complete sets of glass stones and boards also suggest that the number of stones matched the number of squares on each player’s side, regardless of the board size. We can be very certain, therefore, of this as the starting arrangement in Petteia. We can assume, from the Essex find of the Latrunculi board that Black plays first.
“The objective is to either capture or immobilize all the enemies stones. The principle of play is to surround an enemy on two sides, in a horizontal or vertical line. Multiple stone captures are probably permissible if we take Piso’s words literally when he said, “You win and both your hands rattle with the captured group.”
There are now several games which at least draw upon the thoughts of the past.
In most cases stones move as rooks in chess; orthogonally (horizontal or vertical, but not diagonal). They cannot skip over other stones.
I suspect even in this we have put a modern twist to the game as early chess rooks had limited movement, and I suspect that was the case with Petteia too, in part because of the conventions of foot troop warfare being a more plodding reality of the time too.
Moshe W. Callen has created several rulesets, for a version available through www.nestorgames.com, based off the idea of Petteia, one of the more intriguing adding a third stone colour.
“Whenever a piece is captured, it is immediately replaced by an incitus (third color piece) which cannot be moved by either player. Thereafter no piece may move onto or through the space occupied by the incitus. For all purposes, a space occupied by an incitus is treated as if that point were completely removed from the board so that it cannot be occupied or traversed. Such a space’s only role in capture arises due the fact that it limits the movement of any piece on an adjacent space,” notes the rules.
The great thing about the set is it’s variety of play, and that the rules are available online, since the board is easily made and glass beads readily available to try.
