[1] On Greek and Roman board games in general see pi 1384 and the bibliography below, especially the essays by Austin and the references to Toner and the Oxford History of Board Games. For game-boards, many of which are found in taverns, see Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome 90-91; for a summary of the commoner range of shapes of game-boards known see Roueché, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias 250-252.
[2] At Troy. Sophocles mentions his invention of a board game, almost certainly not this race game but the Greek war game (cf. pi 1384), in two lost plays, Nauplius (fr. 429P = 393N) and Palamedes. Plato correctly assigns the invention of the race game to the Egyptians (Phaedrus 274C-D; cf. Taillardat, p. 149, and Oxford History of Board Games pp. 70-73 and the preceding pages).
[3] Literally 'with great philosophy': 'ingenuity' seems to be the idea.
[4] Or, 'the game-board': tabla (the second syllable drops out in the Greek version of the Latin word) is both the name of the game and the word for a game-board.
[5] Many (not all) Roman game-boards have 12 squares/circles, or a multiple of twelve (see Roueché). The original Greek board apparently consisted of three rows of 12 points each, and the pieces moved in the apparent motion of the planets in the sky, East to West, West to East unseen, East to West. During the Roman Empire, probably shortly before the time of the Emperor Zeno's disastrous dice throw on a board of 24 points (reported by Agathias, AP 9.482, and analyzed in an essay by R.G. Austin), the modern board of 24 points came into being and the game was called alea in Rome and tabla or table in Greece. It is this game that is the ancestor of modern tavli in Greece and of backgammon. A much simpler game with three pieces played on a circular table with 12 holes (well illustrated in Roueché) may have been a version of tabla. Ovid describes it, 'There is a sort of game, confined by subtle method (tenui ratione) into as many lines as the slippery year has months: a small board has three counters on either side, and you win by joining your pieces up. Play a thousand games (a girl ought not to be unaware of the rules): you can often score by playing.' (Ars Amatoria 3.363-8). The word for the squares (ka/soi) is the Latin casus adopted in Greek: cf. E.A. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (Cambridge, MA and Leipzig, 1914), s.v.
[6] Sophocles' Lexicon gives kokki/on as equivalent to Latin tessella, a little cube. The normal Greek word for the 6-sided die is ku/bos (kappa 2602).
[7] The source for this entry seems to be Malalas' Chronicle, written in the mid-sixth century AD. Malalas 5.22/103 says: 'Palamedes ... first devised the game of tabula from the movement of the seven planets that bring men joys and griefs by the hazard of fate; he made the tabula board the terrestrial world, the twelve kasoi the number of signs of the zodiac, the dice-box and the seven dice in it the seven stars, and the tower the height of heaven, from which good and evil are distributed to all.' The "tower" is the fluted receptacle used to shake and toss the dice without the opportunity to cheat; it was at least sometimes used above the head for the reasons given here. The dice of the gods always fall well (cf. delta 748).
[8] The Suda compiler seems to have put his own spin on the source here. Malalas (note 7) says that the 'height of heaven', i.e. the visible heaven as understood via astrology (and symbolized by the 'tower' on the tabula board: the larger circle or rosette seen on many carved game-boards) distributes 'good and evil' to all. A writer of intermediate date, John of Antioch (floruit first half of seventh century), says in his summary of the Malalas piece, '(Palamedes) suggested ... by the tower, the height of heaven, from which both good and bad things are given to all' (John fr.41 Roberto). But the Suda shows an anti-astrological outlook by rejecting the idea that astrology distributes good and bad things: in the compiler's version, only evil can come of astrology.