Dmytro Polovynka

How to play Five Lines (Pente Grammai) - the game of Ancient Greece.

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Five lines (Pente Grammai) is a modern name for a mysterious ancient Greek game. Achilles and Ajax played this game during the siege of Troy. At least there are many vases where they are depicted as playing the game.

The game was popular about 600 years BC, but it seems that it was already forgotten by the turn of the era. No one knows exactly how it is played. But we have depictions of this game, boards, which look like five parallel lines - hence the modern name, and short references in literature.

Having all these data we can try reconstructing the rules, keeping in mind that this game could have been played differently.

There are at least two reconstructions by modern scholars. I will present them one by one and then suggest some rule improvements.

Schaedler’s Five Lines: Racing game

Ulrich Schaedler is a serious game historian and he came up with the popular reconstruction of Five Lines. It was him, who made a connection between numerous five-lines boards and mentions of this game in a literature.

The board game consists of five parallel lines and pieces occupy ends of these lines. Which means that there are exactly ten points which pieces may occupy. The middle line among these five is called a “holy line”. And it’s this “holy line” which is mentioned in literature.

Shortly his rules can be summarized:

Rules as originally stated by Ulrich Schaedler himself follow.

  1. The game Five Lines is for two players.
  2. The game board consists of 5 parallel lines. The line in the middle (the 3rd line) is called “sacred line”. It is possible to draw a transverse line to cut the board into two halves.
  3. The players sit at the short ends of the board with the five lines horizontally before them.
  4. Each player has five counters. At the beginning of the game they place their counters on the ends of the lines (from now on called “points”) at their right hand side of the board so that all the ten points are occupied.
  5. The aim of the game is to move all the five counters on the opposite half of the sacred line, i.e. at the left hand side of the players (a more simple possibility would be to try to place all one’s five counters anywhere on the sacred line).
  6. The players take turns in tossing the die and moving one of their pieces according to the result of the throw.
  7. The pieces are moved from line to line, i.e. from point to point, in an anti-clockwise direction. A counter having reached the last point on one side of the board is shifted along the line to the opposite point, where it is moved down until it reaches the first line, when the same manoeuvre is repeated and so forth.
  8. Counters can move or to a vacant point or to the sacred line. This means that only one counter can be placed on any point, except for the sacred line where more counters (even from both players at the same time) can be placed. If in the first move a 5 is thrown the only possible move is from one side of the sacred line to the other, since all the other points are occupied.
  9. Zugzwang: if possible a move has to be executed, even if a counter must be drawn from the sacred line. In case a move is not possible the player looses his turn.
  10. The player who first reaches the goal, i.e. has moved all his five counters onto the (left half of the) sacred line, wins the game.

Schaedler’s rules are most often used nowadays. There are several variants found online - for example that the starting position is that all the five pieces start from the opponent’s holy line. Or when a piece lands on a holy line, a player gets another throw.

There is some criticism for these rules. For instance these rules don’t take into the account the most cited saying about this game, in particular: “move a piece away from the holy line” which means “do something risky in dire situation” and it should mean a very risky move. In Schaedler’s Five Lines a player would never move a piece away from his holy line, except for a very unlucky throw when it’s an only move.

Also playing the game by these rules is not particularly interesting. Stephen Kidd proposed another set of rules which gives a more interesting game, which feels more like backgammon.

Kidd’s Five Lines: variant with hitting

Stephen Kidd proposed the rules for Five Lines which have an aggressive element to the game, similar to modern backgammon. He tried to create the rules which play well with the most cited saying about Five Lines “moving a piece away from the holy line”. These rules do resemble backgammon - one can hit an opponent piece, when it’s alone on a point (a blot), but two and more piece on the same point are safe. In this variant all pieces start off the board and enter the board during the game. There is nothing really special about holy line - except that players need to put all their pieces there to win.

Rules as originally stated by Stephen Kidd himself follow.

  1. Each player has five pieces and moves their pieces counter-clockwise around the board according to the roll of a single die. Each player starts at the bottom corner on the right-hand side (a full revolution back to that right-hand corner requires 11 steps).
  2. The goal is to land all pieces on the ‘holy line’ in the center, which can only be entered at each player’s left-hand side.
  3. Roll to see who goes first, pieces are kept off the playing space of the board.
  4. If a player has two or more pieces ‘yoked’ on a line the other player cannot land on that side of the line.
  5. If a player lands on the opponent’s single piece (i.e. azux or ‘blot’), the opponent has to remove that piece from the board and start over with it.

I personally find these rules more attractive. Some suggestions which follow are based on Kidd’s variant.

Suggestions for game improvements

Stephen Kidd’s rules are quite interesting. However, they still can be improved.

The first improvement would be to start with all pieces on board, same as Shaedler suggests. Yes - this mean that players may hit opponent pieces immediately on the first move. But then - why this is bad? We don’t know how Greek played the game, but one vase depiction suggests that the stones were situated like this. We can’t be sure it depicted the start of a game, but it is plausible explanation.

– Image of vase –

Both Schaedler’s and Kidd’s variants suffer from few problems. One of them relates to 6D dice. The 6D die’s highest number is too high for this small board. Also, 6D die gives equal probability for all the numbers, which is not that interesting for a backgammon-like game. The second problem is that it’s not very interesting to circle around the board while trying to place the last stone on a holy line.

The first problem is tackled by introducing knucklebones - and if you don’t have any, still read on. The second problem is discussed last with a suggestion of using a special rule.

Use knucklebones instead of dice

Nice thing about backgammon-style games is that two dice throws have unequal probabilities, which gives a game a tactical depth. In Five Lines the one die throw gives no tactical depth - all numbers have an equal chance, so there is no way to strategically put pieces on board.

That’s why I suggest using knucklebones instead of dice. Knucklebones were historically used instead of 6D dice and actually predate them. So using knucklebones instead of dice can be historically accurate.

Nice feature of knucklebones is that there is an unequal distribution of throws. Four sides of knucklebones have roughly the 10%-40%-40%-10% throw distribution.

Knucklebones used in Roman Empire had sides with numbers 1-3-4-6 on them, skipping 2 and 5. For the Five Lines I suggest using a more natural 1-2-3-4 marking with 1 and 4 having 10% chance of occurring each. Notice that the opposite sides add up to 5, which is in line with Five Lines symbolism (5 lines, 5 pieces for each player).

If you don’t happen to have knucklebones at home, there is a simple way to make something resembling knucklebones out of a usual die. Simply paint the 6 and 5 sides to 2 and 3. This can be done in different ways:

This die will give a 17%-33%-33%-17% distribution for 1-2-3-4, which, even though is not the same as knucklebones, still comes close.

In my opinion originally the game was played with knucklebones. But then players introduced dice. This could be seen as a technical improvement, but it made the game be much duller. It’s possible that players switched to more interesting games and Five Lines fell into the oblivion.

Avoid circling around with the last piece rule variant

There is one problem in the Five Lines game, no matter which variation is used. In the endgame the last piece simply circles around the board until it hits the desired number and gets onto the holy line. While someone might like it, others do not, me including. This does not happen in many other racing games because players cannot move past the last point and have to skip their moves if they don’t get the desired throw, or they may exit on a non-exact throw, so these cannot be an inspiration for the rule.

There are two ways of tackling this problem. The simpler one of two is to change the winning condition: a player should place four of his counters on a holy line to win, not five. Some modern games use this approach.

Another, more complex rule would be this: allow a player to skip the move if it’s his last piece on board and the throw would force him to miss a holy line

So for example if a player needs a throw of 2, but he gets 3 - this will force him to make another circle around the board, so he decides to skip the move instead. However, if he gets 1, he has to move. Additionally, if a player is not able to move 3, because the target point is occupied with two opposing pieces, he has to move a piece from a holy line. So only if a player is able to move, this is his last piece but the throw would require to make him another circle - a player may pass. This is not as complicated as it sounds.

Choose the variation you like more. Or ignore the rule completely, if circling around the board in the endgame is not a problem for you.

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