Ludeme:
A ludeme is “an element of play” within a card game or board game, as distinct from an “instrument of play” which forms part of the equipment with which a game is played. An example of a ludeme is the L-shaped movement of a knight in chess, whereas the knight itself is an instrument of play. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “The ancient board games we finally know how to play – thanks to AI,” Jeremy Hsu, NewScientist (14 December 2024, paywall):
Another way that AI can help is testing how the myriad permutations of possible rules play out, to find out which are fun and which lead to tedium. This is done by breaking the game down into units of game-playing information and feeding these “ludemes” into an AI.
Neither article gives the etiology of ludeme, so I can’t actually say that ludeme comes from an early game otherwise mentioned in the NewScientist article:
One of the first case studies for this AI approach has been Ludus Latrunculorum – one of the ancient games that we know the most about because of historical writings. “This gave our reconstruction process the best chance of success,” says Cameron Browne at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who led the Digital Ludeme Project (DLP) – a five-year project that ran until 2023 and that “investigated the full range of over 1000 traditional games throughout 6000 years of human history”.
