[legitster]

The thing missing here is that nearly all of the games that use these nodes + stones are a variant on Nine Men's Morris (or Twelve Men's Morris, or etc). Discovering the ruleset for a particular variant is kind of like discovering a new version of "Uno" based on uncovering new house rules.

Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.