Portable ROTA Board

ROTA is a game that has been transmitted from antiquity. The archaeological record gives the board, scratched into Roman ruins at various sites, consisting of 9 spaces connected in a network. The game lay fallow for millennia, until Elmer Truesdell Merrill, an English scholar, proposed a scheme for play in a [1916 journal article](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3287728). His ruleset was speculative, and we have never confirmed that it corresponds with the Attic manner of play[†]. Nevertheless, the "Elmer system" took off like wildfire. Today Elmer's rules are canonical throughout the international ROTA community, from the youngest child putting their first pieces on the board, to the storied grandmasters who have taken the art of ROTA to dazzling heights and assumed their deserved ranks in the intelligentsia.

The method of play is simple. Each player has three personal tokens. For the first six turns, the players alternate placing these tokens on the board. Once all six tokens are in