Hnefatafl

Hnefatafl gameplay: the rules this table uses

Hnefatafl gameplay is a siege and an escape carried out in the same moves. The board is eleven squares by eleven. Twenty-four attackers stand in blocks against each edge. Twelve defenders sit packed around the centre, and the king stands on the throne in the middle of them. Attackers move first. Every piece, the king included, slides horizontally or vertically across any number of empty squares, the way a rook does. Nothing moves diagonally and nothing jumps.

Enemy pieces are captured by sandwiching. Move so that an enemy sits directly between your piece and either another of yours or a hostile square, and it comes off the board. Say a defender has an attacker directly above it: the moment a second attacker slides into the square directly below, that defender is taken. Corners are hostile to both armies, and so is the throne at the centre while it stands empty, so a piece caught between an attacker and an empty throne goes as surely as one caught between two attackers. A piece that walks into the gap between two enemies of its own accord is safe, because only the move that closes the trap takes anything.

The king is harder. He is captured when the besieging army surrounds him on all four sides, or on three with the empty throne filling the last. All of those squares have to exist, which makes an edge the one place he cannot be taken at all: it is not possible to fill a side that is off the board. He is armed here, so he can close a sandwich himself and take an attacker the way any defender does.

Only the king may stop on the throne or on a corner, though anything may pass through the throne while it is empty. The defending side wins the moment he reaches a corner. The attacking side wins when the king is captured, and whichever army finds itself with nothing legal to play has lost. The same position three times over with the same army to move is a draw. There is no move limit beyond that, so a game ends in one of those four ways or not at all. Many variants add rules on top of that list. This table does not, so there is no shieldwall capture, no exit fort and no win by encirclement.

Two armies, two different jobs, and a computer that plays either

Most board games hand both players the same pieces and the same job. Hnefatafl does not. One army is closing a ring. The other wants a road out of it, and one road is enough.

Counting pieces will mislead you here, because the two sides are paid in different coin. An attacker is cheap. Losing six of twenty-four costs the plan very little while the ring still holds. A defender is expensive, because twelve of them have to watch every direction at once. Attackers make progress by closing gaps, defenders by opening a line to a corner. The computer opponent works to the same lopsided arithmetic. It scores a defender at twice an attacker, docks thirty-five points for every attacker standing next to the king, and adds twelve for each step the king stands closer to the nearest corner. It looks one move ahead and no further, which is enough to punish a lane left open.

There is a reason a computer opponent ships with each of these boards, and it is not only company. It is how a game gets played through before anybody is offered a seat at it. The owner puts it plainly: "I have play tested every game that ships."

What the name means

Tafl is Old Norse for a table, and it was the everyday word for a board game, the way tæfl in Anglo-Saxon England covered a whole shelf of them. Hnefatafl is usually read as the board game of the fist, from hnefi, fist. H. J. R. Murray called the sense of hnefi doubtful and its use certain: whatever it meant, it named the king piece standing in the centre. Some writers turn the whole name into king's table instead. Viking chess is a modern nickname, often used and never medieval.

How to say it

The f is the part that trips people, because in Old Norse it carries a v sound. Hnefatafl lands closer to nev-a-tavl than to anything with two f sounds in it, and the stress sits at the front. The h before the n is a breathed consonant English gave up long ago. Say nef-a-tafl in an English sentence and you will be understood. Old Norse pronunciation is itself reconstructed from spelling, verse and the languages that came after it, so the guide above is an approximation and not a recording.

Nobody wrote the rules down

No historical account of how hnefatafl was played survives. The history that reaches us is material: pieces, fragments of boards, and a few saga passages that argue about the game instead of explaining it. Chess had displaced tafl across Scandinavia by the twelfth century and the instructions went with it. What the Vikings played is the open question under every modern set.

One game in the family kept its rules, and it is not the Norse one. In 1732 Carl Linnaeus travelled through Lule Sámi country on his Lapland expedition and wrote down, in Latin, the rules of a nine by nine game played on embroidered reindeer hide, with a sketch of the board and its pieces. He called it tablut. Even the name is shaky, because the word is closer to playing board games than to any single game, and Linnaeus appears to have taken the activity for the title. His hosts called the defending pieces Swedes, the attacking pieces Muscovites, and the king konakis.

A mistranslation from 1811, and the board you are looking at

Linnaeus's journal was published as Lachesis Lapponica and put into English in 1811 by James Edward Smith. The tablut rules inside it were translated by a Swedish merchant in London, Carl Troilius, and that translation carried errors. The one that mattered says four attackers are always needed to capture the king. The Latin asks for two, the same as for any other piece, and makes its exception only at the centre: a king standing beside the empty castle has to be shut in on the three remaining sides, and a king on the castle itself on all four.

Every modern tafl game descends from that English text. A king who takes four attackers to trap is a much safer king, so the reconstruction came out tilted toward the defenders, and the correction that stuck was to make the escape harder rather than the capture easier: corners only, where Linnaeus had the king leaving by any square along the edge. A boxed set called The Viking Game sold that version from 1981, and that version is what this board plays. Sit down here and you are playing a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a Sámi game of the 1700s read through an 1811 error and patched in the 1980s to balance it.

John Ashton in 2007, Nicolas Cartier in 2011 and Olli Salmi in 2013 returned to the Latin and restored the two-sided capture. What none of them could settle is the castle, so two versions of tablut are in play today: in one of them nothing may enter the centre square once the king has left it, and in the other the king may return while other pieces pass through without stopping. Under the corrected rules the two armies come out close to level, with the attacking side marginally ahead rather than behind. How far ahead is not a number worth printing, because the counts come from collected games and they move with the ruleset those games were played under. Linnaeus recorded two warning calls as well, raichi when the king had one clear path to the edge and tuichu when he had two, which is the job check does in chess. Nothing on this board calls them for you.

The rest of the family, and the rules people play now

Hnefatafl is the best known of the tafl games, an ancient family from northern Europe played in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Britain, Ireland and Sápmi, and Murray and Helmfrid both trace a Roman influence on them from latrunculi. The variants differ mostly in scale. Brandubh in Ireland, whose name means black raven, is seven by seven, five against eight. Tablut is nine by nine. The tawlbwrdd that Robert ap Ifan drew in a Welsh manuscript in 1587 is eleven by eleven with twelve defenders and twenty-four attackers, the same forces this table sets out. Alea evangelii, drawn and described in manuscript 122 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, uses nineteen by nineteen intersections and wraps the whole thing in a gospel allegory.

Modern play has settled on a handful of rule sets, and many of the differences between those variants answer the same complaint, which is that a king needing four attackers made the reconstruction too kind to the defenders. The Fetlar hnefatafl rules take their name from the Shetland island where Peter Kelly revived the game in 2008, and where a world championship has been played each summer since at ten seconds a move, timed by a gong. Copenhagen hnefatafl builds on Fetlar and has largely replaced it in international play. It adds a shieldwall capture that lifts a row of pieces off at once, and an exit fort that lets the king out along an edge instead of at a corner.

Hnefatafl strategy, learned twice

The rules take about a minute. The game takes longer, because you have to learn it twice, once from each chair, and the strategy on one side barely transfers to the other.

Attacking, the common first mistake is spreading out to cover everything, which builds thin walls and leaves a lane a rook-like king walks straight down. The ring is only as strong as its thinnest wall, and the king needs one clear rank or file, not two. Defending, the first mistake is chasing captures, taking the ring apart one piece at a time while the king sits where he started with a line to nowhere.

Two habits follow from the arithmetic. Trades suit the besieging side, because twenty-four pieces can spend and twelve cannot, so swapping a defender for an attacker is a bargain in the wrong direction. And the defending side wants two roads open rather than one, because a single line to a corner can be shut by a single piece. Two questions cover most of it. As the attackers, which open line from the king to a corner is cheapest to close. As the defenders, where is the second one. The king himself helps with that, because on this board he cannot be captured while he stands on an edge, which makes an edge a square to wait on while the second road opens.

The boards that came out of the ground

The objects are real even where the rules are not. A wooden board came up from the ship burial at Gokstad in Norway, a grave of about the year 900, with thirteen by thirteen squares on one face and nine men's morris cut into the back. A seven by seven board pierced with holes for pegged pieces, possibly so that it could travel, was dug up at Ballinderry in Ireland in 1932. An eleven by eleven board from the twelfth century was found near Trondheim. Those two sizes, eleven and thirteen, are the ones reconstructions argue between. A blue glass piece topped with white droplets that may be a crown came out of an eighth or ninth century trench on Lindisfarne. A runestone at Ockelbo in Sweden shows people at a tafl board.

The written traces are thinner. In Orkneyinga saga the jarl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson lists nine skills he is proud of and puts tafl at the top. Friðþjófs saga gives the king's men red and the attackers white, and it confirms that hnefi is the king piece. The riddles in the saga of Hervör and Heidrek are the closest thing to instructions anyone has, and readers still disagree over whether one of them describes a die. Boards attested, pieces attested, rules guessed.

Playing hnefatafl online, or across one table

The table comes from one button, and the link comes with it. Whoever should command the other army has only to open that link: no account to set up, nothing to install, and no need for the two of you to be in the same country. Two people in one room can share a screen and hand it across at each turn instead. With nobody to hand it to, choose an army and the computer plays the other one.

The board keeps the bookkeeping. Pick a piece up and its legal squares are marked, captures lift themselves off, and nothing has to be settled by argument about whether a corner is hostile or the throne is empty. Which army to take has an answer here, and it is a report on how a seat feels rather than a measurement of the balance. The owner's own answer to that: "if you are playing the defender it always feels like you are underwhelmed and outnumbered, so if you enjoy a challenge take the defender." Take the attackers if you would rather win.