Talk:Tafl games
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Is this a complicated game or what?! I think the rules need a little more work as I only got the vaguest idea of what goes on. charlieF 13:25 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)
well my native tongue is not english,so that explains the trouble.. the actual rules are very simple, but I couldn't make them easier..
Hnefatafl is one of family of similar games... in fact, the text and picture currently in this article actually discuss Tablut. Should this article perhaps be moved to "Tafl games"? Jeffhos 17:29, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I've added a little information about brandubh, and a link to the "Early Irish Board Games" article from which the information came. In fact I ought to have taken out the "about which we know very little" comment as this, with the 7x7 boards found in Ireland, make this game reasonably well documented (compared to others). Snigfarp 9 July 2005 13:54 (UTC)
Further edits: I've taken out the link "Hnefatafl: the Strategic Board Game of the Vikings" as unfortunately this excellent article has disappeared from the web. --Snigfarp 11:37, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The word "castle" as a name for the central square was recently changed to "throne". In fact "castle" was the word employed by Linnaeus for this. The word "throne" has been used by more modern commentators. I'm not sure whether it comes from an historical source or not. --Snigfarp 09:43, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
The rules depend on who has done the reconstruction. It is generally assumed that the soldiers can travel any distance, but some variants limit this. It is also generally assumed that soldiers cannot land on the King Square (in the middle), but it is unclear if the corner squares are also King Squares. (They might even be out of bounds to all, as that would be consistant with Celtic buildings, which were all round and therefore had no corners.) It is also unclear if soldiers could even CROSS the central King Square. If it was a throne of some kind, it would be arguable that nothing should be able to cross over it, that you'd have to stop there to navigate round the obstruction.
A common variant is to have the King escape in the corners (as they are marked the same way as the center square). If we assume this to be a reconstruction of a raid, however, the "escape" would be through the doors, which would be the squares in the middle of each side (where the "raiders" came in and fan out from). Having the King "escape" along any point along any edge appears to make the game too unbalanced and would make no logical sense, but this doesn't mean that it wasn't how the game was played. I doubt many Norse had degrees in game theory.
One of the very few points of agreement is that black starts off with twice as many foot soldiers as white (ignoring the white king). The initial layouts, however, vary wildly between reconstruction efforts and cannot be trusted as anything more than guidelines.
As there was commerce and migrations between regions and even between nations, there would need to be some level of unification between the rulesets, pieces and strategies. You almost couldn't have totally isolated evolution of games from a common origin, with a high level of interaction between players of different variants. Even if they evolved somewhat isolated, there would have been some borrowing of ideas - simply because people are people, and competition & rivalry would have been difficult otherwise.
The 19x19 format seems to be more akin to a sea battle than a raid, but it seems unlikely that converting the game to a naval format would have occured to invading Christians, as they had no naval fleets to speak of. This suggests (to me) that we're missing one or more variants that explain the transition from hall raid to naval battle. -- JD
The idea that the 19x19 games is a naval battle is a modern one. The original source for this game, the Corpus Christi College manuscript 122, mentions elements "city and citadel" and "dukes and counts" among other things, and this seems to suggest that contemporary players viewed this as a land conflict. --Snigfarp 07:59, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't agree that the game is played incorrectly. Norsemen did indeed believe that Kings were more important than themselves even though they could vote out Kings (though this did change) hence warriors where usually loyal to their Kings and accepted the King's rings. The King is loyal to his people and the people are loyal to the King however the King has more power and is thus more important to his country. The capture of the King in the game is most likely correct. This article does not cite any references. --Hesselius 13:35, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
The fact is, that we have records of games played both ways--tablut with the king captured on four sides, and tawlbwrdd with the king captured on two. So the rule seems to be whatever takes the fancy of the players in a given time and place, or to put it less flippantly, whatever works best with the other rules they've chosen to adopt. --Snigfarp 19:44, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
