The Phaistos Disc Might Be a Board Game, Not Writing

January

/ 2026

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The Phaistos Disc has been treated for more than a century as one of archaeology’s great undeciphered “texts.” But a new study argues the mystery may be both simpler and stranger than a lost language. The proposal is that it might not be writing at all, but a specialized board game or rule-based playing device made in Bronze Age Crete.

The proposal comes from Constantinos Ragazas, who suggests the Disc fits better as an “iterative procedural artifact” than as an inscription meant to be read, reports La Brújula Verde. In other words, the Disc’s layout, symbol orientation, and production clues may be telling us “how to play” rather than “what to say.”

Why the “Board Game” Idea Is Back

The Phaistos Disc was discovered in 1908 at the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete, stamped on both sides with pictorial signs arranged in a spiral. It has inspired countless attempts at decipherment - alongside arguments that it might be something else, including a calendar or a ritual object (and, occasionally, a game).

Ragazas’ case leans heavily on material details rather than speculative translation. One example highlighted in coverage by the Greek Reporter is the uneven quality of impressions between the two sides, consistent with clay changing as it dried, suggesting the Disc was made in stages, not neatly “written” in a single sitting like a finished message.

That idea (prototype rather than polished “book”) also fits another long-running puzzle: why the Disc is essentially a one-off. Unlike Linear B (and unlike most true scripts), it doesn’t come with a wider “library” of comparable texts to cross-check meaning.

Palace of Phaistos ruins on Crete, Greece.

The Disc was found here in the Palace of Phaistos ruins, in Crete, Greece. (Olaf Tausch/CC BY 3.0)

The Design Clues: Two Zones and Outward-Facing Symbols

The new interpretation emphasizes how the Disc is structured: a rim of compartment-like spaces and an interior spiral track. Notably, the outer symbols tend to face outward - toward someone looking down at the Disc - while the inner signs follow the spiral path, a detail that can feel awkward for reading but natural for a “player-facing” layout explains Ragazas’ account.

This is a key point, because games are often designed around visibility and turn-taking, while writing is usually optimized for a single reader’s orientation. Ragazas’ argument, as summarized in the press, is that the Disc behaves less like a sentence and more like a sequence of fixed “moves” or instructions locked into spaces.

This is also where broader context becomes useful. Spiral-track board games are known in the ancient world, including Egypt’s Mehen (“the coiled one”), although no one is claiming the Phaistos Disc is a direct copy. The key point is that spiral layouts belong to the visual vocabulary of play as well as text, and sometimes more convincingly.

Phaistos disc symbols close up.

Detail photograph of Phaistos Disc symbols. (Asb/CC BY-SA 3.0)

What This Would Change (and What It Doesn’t Solve)

If the Disc is a game board, it reframes the century-long “decipherment race.” The question would shift from “what language is this?” to “what system is this?”, with symbols possibly acting like icons for actions, roles, hazards, or scoring rather than phonetic values. That could explain why translation attempts run into a wall: they are treating rules as prose.

At the same time, calling it a game doesn’t magically tell us the rules. Without accompanying pieces, parallel boards, or written descriptions, even a correct “game” identification could remain stubbornly opaque, just in a different way. And competing theories remain alive, from hymn-like readings to calendar interpretations, reminding us how easily a single extraordinary artifact can absorb modern expectations.

Still, the “board game” framing has a quiet strength: it’s testable. Scholars can compare wear patterns, spatial logic, and symbol clustering against known game-board behaviors, rather than betting everything on a single lucky decipherment breakthrough.

Top image: Phaistos Disc (Side A), Heraklion Archaeological Museum. Source: Gleb Simonov/CC0

By Gary Manners