The ancient Chinese board game Liubo was once very popular but is now only known from limited artifacts and texts. Its boards are often found buried in tombs, along with playing pieces. Scholars have argued for centuries about how the board game was actually played, and several methods have been proposed. The main goal of this project is to reconstruct and playtest this “lost” ancient board game based on available artifacts, texts, records, English/Chinese-language scholarship, consulting with experts, together with our team member’s own ideas about player experience, game design, and playtesting multiple versions of the game and see which version has the most fun. The deliverable of this project will be a digital method on PC to teach our audiences how to play this proposed reconstruction of Liubo, also convey the history of the game and information about how it’s evolved, redesigned, and reconstructed throughout time.
