Default: CC BY 4.0
Attribution required; commercial use and derivatives allowed — the deliberate opposite of a no-derivatives wall. Read the licence →
The Open Ludeme Commons
Traditional games belong to everyone. Spark & Anvil authors its own clean-room descriptions of the world's classic board games — the parameterised rule-data (board, pieces, moves, end-conditions) behind our games — and releases them here as an open commons under Creative Commons BY 4.0: free to read, share, and build on, with attribution.
It's the open, reusable alternative to closed or non-derivative game databases — a small contribution back to the open-education and games-research communities that make traditional-game scholarship possible. This is a licence and provenance index over descriptions we already own; the descriptions themselves live in our games.
The licence
CC0 1.0 for raw data
Reserved for the rawest reconstruction data (e.g. archaeological wear-facts), where attribution friction is undesirable. CC0 →
“Game description authored by Spark & Anvil (sparkanvil.org) from primary sources, released under CC BY 4.0. Game rules are uncopyrightable methods of operation; this is our own clean-room expression of them.”
What's in the commons — and what isn't
✓ In the commons
- Our own clean-room rule descriptions — board, pieces, moves, end-conditions, metadata
- The primary source each description was authored from
✗ Not in the commons
- Our engine or app source code (their own licence)
- Cast art, story or lesson content
- Any child data — we collect none (see our privacy policy)
The descriptions
8 traditional games, each authored from primary sources. Every one also plays in your browser, free.
| Game | Licence | Primary source (provenance) |
|---|---|---|
| Nine Men's Morris | CC BY 4.0 | R.C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations; H.J.R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (the Roman/medieval merels family). |
| Fox & Geese | CC BY 4.0 | R.C. Bell; H.J.R. Murray (the asymmetric hunt-game family). |
| Nim | CC0 1.0 | Classical impartial game, public domain (C.L. Bouton, "Nim, a game with a complete mathematical theory", 1901). |
| Dots & Boxes | CC BY 4.0 | Édouard Lucas, La Pipopipette (1889); Elwyn Berlekamp, combinatorial game theory of the game. |
| Hex | CC BY 4.0 | Piet Hein (1942) and John Nash (independent invention); the rules are a method of operation — this is our own clean-room expression. |
| Go (9×9) | CC BY 4.0 | Traditional (East Asian); R.C. Bell; H.J.R. Murray. The 9×9 board is our own beginner parameterisation of the classical rules. |
| Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) | CC BY 4.0 | Traditional (Chinese); H.J.R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. |
| Ludus Coriovalli (rule-space reconstruction) | CC0 1.0 (wear-facts) + CC BY 4.0 (our rule-space) | The CC0 Ludus Coriovalli reconstruction dataset (board wear-facts); our own clean-room expression of the candidate rule-space (ADR-196 corpus). |
Heritage games — added with care
We add descriptions of living cultural-heritage games respectfully — sources cited, and the difference between a described and an authoritative ruleset made clear (traditional games have regional variants; ours is one described version, not the single canon). These are publicly-documented, publicly-played games:
| Game | Tradition | Primary source (provenance) |
|---|---|---|
| Ô Ăn Quan | Vietnam · CC BY 4.0 | Traditional Vietnamese mancala-family game, documented in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology; first Western description 1944. A described ruleset as commonly taught — regional variants exist. |
| Cờ Gánh | Vietnam · CC BY 4.0 | Traditional Vietnamese custodial-capture ("carry") game, documented in Vietnamese folk-game scholarship. A described ruleset as commonly taught — regional variants exist. |
| Cờ Chân Chó | Vietnam · CC BY 4.0 | Traditional Vietnamese alignment-and-capture game, documented in Vietnamese folk-game references. A described ruleset as commonly taught — regional variants exist. |
Game rules are uncopyrightable methods of operation; every description here is Spark & Anvil's own clean-room expression, authored from the cited primary sources — never copied from another games database. Contributions (including a moderated gallery of learner-authored descriptions) are planned. Questions about reuse or attribution? Reach us via About.