Hnefatafl — Play Viking Chess Online

Long before chess reached the North, the Norse played a game with no equivalent in the modern world: one side outnumbered the other two to one, yet the two sides wanted entirely different things. The attackers had to trap a king; the king’s men only had to walk him to the edge of the world. Below you can play it — against an AI that understands both halves of that lopsided fight — and then read how much of it we genuinely know.

How it works

Twenty-four attackers ring the board. Twelve defenders and their king hold the centre throne. Everything moves like a rook in chess: any distance along a row or column, no diagonals, no jumping. You capture an enemy soldier by trapping it between two of your own pieces — but the trap only springs when you close it with your move, so it is safe to step into a gap. The four corners and the throne are restricted to the king alone.

The defenders win when the king reaches a corner. The attackers win by surrounding him on all four sides — three sides and the throne when he stands beside it. One deliberate quirk of the modern tournament rules: the king cannot be pinned against the bare edge of the board, only by pieces or special squares.

The honest part: nobody wrote the rules down

No complete medieval ruleset for hnefatafl survives. The single first-hand account of any game in the family is Carl Linnaeus’s — the botanist, in 1732, watched Sámi people in Lapland play a nine-by-nine version called Tablut and sketched the board and rules in his travel diary. Everything else, including the eleven-by-eleven “Viking chess” most people play today, is reconstructed from that one account, from scattered mentions in the sagas, and from boards dug out of the ground.

The version here is “Copenhagen Hnefatafl,” an eleven-by-eleven game balanced for tournament play in the early twenty-first century by reconstructors building on Linnaeus and on H. J. R. Murray’s 1952 study A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. It is inspired by the evidence, not transcribed from it — and getting the balance right took real engineering. On a fair board the defenders win slightly more often than the attackers, which is why our AI plays the two sides with two different strategies.

What the spade turned up

Boards survive even where rules do not. A wooden seven-by-seven board with peg-holes came out of Ballinderry in Ireland, from the Viking-Irish ninth or tenth century, and sits in the National Museum of Ireland. The Gokstad ship burial in Norway held a gaming board among its grave goods; a well-preserved board fragment was excavated at Trondheim; a bone board with peg-holes survives from Norse Birsay in Orkney. Gaming sets, with a distinguished king-piece, were buried with the dead as a mark of status. The Hervarar saga even hides hnefatafl inside a riddle, where the fair pieces attack and the dark defend their king.

The game ruled the Norse world for centuries and then lost to chess, which arrived in the eleventh and twelfth — the Norse simply slotted it into the old vocabulary as skáktafl, “chess-tafl.” The Lewis chessmen mark that changeover. Tafl itself clung on longest at the edges: in Wales into the seventeenth century, and among the Sámi until Linnaeus found it.

Sources

• Carl Linnaeus, Iter Lapponicum (1732); English trans. J. E. Smith, Lachesis Lapponica (1811). Manuscript: Linnean Society of London.
• H. J. R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (Oxford, 1952).
• National Museum of Ireland — Ballinderry board (1932:6533); National Museums Scotland — Birsay board and the Lewis chessmen.
• Copenhagen and Fetlar hnefatafl rules, Aage Nielsen (aagenielsen.dk) — the modern tournament standard.

Frequently asked questions