HNEFATAFL
A traditional game, with several commercial versions.


This game has many names, some of them old, like tawl-bwrdd and Cyning Tæfl, and some more obviously modern and commercial, like Viking Chess, and the literal meaning of "hnefatafl": King's Table. Do a search for "Hnefatafl" in Google and you'll find a few sites describing the history of the game. Suffice here to say that it predates chess, and versions of it have been found all round Europe, Scandinavia and the British Isles. Though it is best known as a Viking game, it was far from confined to the Viking areas of the world. It was known to be played in Wales as late as 1587, and in Lapland in 1723, though it was at its height of popularity around 400 A.D.

My home-made hnefatafl board, with glass pieces.

One advantage of its being a traditional game is that no one owns the idea, or the rules, so I am free here to say what I like about them, and to describe the full game. One drawback is that there are many many different versions of the game, and no utterly complete set of rules survives from its heyday, and so it can be difficult to settle on a set of rules that one likes.

There are many known different boards from the past, and different numbers of pieces. To make your own set, you need to create a grid of squares for a board, and have two sets of pieces, one for the attackers and one for the defenders, plus one special piece to represent the king. I used flower-arranging glass blobs for the pieces, and drew a board with a pen, coloured it in with pencils, and stuck it with sprayed glue to the back of a board that came with a commercial board game, then covered it with book-covering film. I have drawn on five "king's squares": one in the centre, sometimes known as the "throne", and four in the corners. Other squares are drawn on showing the starting positions of the pieces. I have made mine 11 x 11, which is a common size, though other boards are much bigger, and some are 7 x 7 or 9 x 9. The board is always square and always has an odd number of spaces to a side, so that the king can start in the centre.

Most two-player games are symmetrical, in that both players have the same resources and the same objective. Hnefatafl is different. One player starts in the centre of the board and tries to get his king to escape, and the other starts around the edges with about twice as many pieces, and has to capture the enemy's king. All pieces move like rooks in chess - orthogonally along rows and columns, but not diagonally, any number of empty squares - and are blocked by other pieces. So far, I have told you the rules common to all versions. After this, things get a bit variable.

Since the game is not symmetrical, there is a difficult issue of game balance. With one set of rules, it may seem that the attacker captures the king almost every time, and with another set, the defender whips his king to freedom with ease. However, it often turns out that the tactics used by a player when testing a set of rules were poor, and that with the same set of rules, a good player can reverse the bias and win every time when before it seemed that he should lose.

However, for the serious gamer, who loves experimenting with rules and strategies, this can make the game a satisfying intellectual exercise. The ideal would be to find a game that is balanced such that the attacker wins about half the time. Hnefatafl offers players the opportunity to balance the game according to the relative skills of the players. An expert playing against a novice can balance the game by adopting a few rules that favour his opponent.

Instead of trying to describe a hundred variants of the overall game, which would take a hundred thousand words, I will describe the variations on each single rule. You will have to put them together in your own way to make a complete game that is reasonably balanced. Each variant will favour one player or the other, and some will favour one player massively when they are used in combination with some other rule. I shall call the ordinary pieces that make up all of the attackers and all but one of the defenders "soldiers". The last piece is the king. The squares where pieces start are "camps", except the central one, which is the "throne".

Rules I like to use are: A1 or A2; B2 and B3; C7(a) I use a lot, although I find C1 does work; D1 is my usual, but D2 is good for game balance; E1 is my usual; F1 or F2 are good for balancing a game; G 2 and 3; H 1 or 2 - makes little difference usually; I1. You might think that certain rules, such as having a king killed like a soldier, would skew the game far too much towards one player, but there is usually a tactic that makes each game variant winnable for both sides.

The game often starts with a frantic rush to block the exits by the attacker, but as the attacker does this, the defender can develop his position unmolested. The defender can usually get a soldier or two near to the exits, where they can keep the exit open. If the attacker can surround the defender's pieces entirely, then with careful play he can slowly tighten the net and win, although there often comes tricky part when the row of advancing attackers has to negotiate the throne, which often has special rules affecting it. If the attacker does block the exits, the game is not over, because he hasn't yet captured the king, and it takes a lot of his men to block the exits.

A game for experimentalist gamers.

You may now be dying to have a go at this game. Why not try it online at one of these three websites?

Aage Nielsen's site           irt.org/game (go to the games page once you're there and select web games)         Caltech site

The last of these, I've just noticed, repeats most of what I have just written. Heigh ho.

For lots on the history of the game, try Games Cabinet or Sten Helmfrid's page or treheima.



BACK TO GAME REVIEW MENU    BACK TO GAMES MENU

Click here to go back to the home page