The rules of hnefatafl
Hnefatafl is a hunt game for two players in which the two sides want different things and own different numbers of pieces. This page teaches the whole game from a blank board, in the order you need it.
Updated
The board and the squares that are not ordinary
Hnefatafl is played on a square grid with an odd number of squares along each side, so that exactly one square sits in the middle. The usual modern size is eleven by eleven. Two of the older rule sets in the family use smaller boards: nine by nine, and seven by seven.
Squares are named here the way chess squares are named, because it makes a game easy to write down. Files run from left to right and take letters starting at a. Ranks run from bottom to top and take numbers starting at 1. On an eleven by eleven board the files are a to k and the ranks are 1 to 11, so the middle square is f6. On a nine by nine board the middle is e5, and on a seven by seven board it is d4.
Most squares are plain. Up to five are not, and every rule that follows depends on knowing which is which.
- The throne
- The middle square. The defending king begins on it. In every rule set here, only the king may end a move on it. Some codes call it by a local name — the Sami word for it is konakis.
- The corners
- The four squares at the extreme points of the board. In most rule sets these are the squares the king is trying to reach, and only he may stand on them. In two of the codes here, tawlbwrdd and tablut, the corners are plain board with no power at all.
- The edge
- Every square along the four outside lines of the board. The edge is only a marked area in the codes where the king escapes by reaching it rather than by reaching a corner.
Two sides, two different problems
Hnefatafl is asymmetric. The two players are not playing the same game and do not hold the same forces. One side attacks, the other defends, and the two sides win in completely different ways.
The attackers are the larger army. They begin in groups spaced around the outside of the board, roughly at the middle of each edge, and they outnumber the defenders by about two to one. Their job is to close a net and keep it closed.
The defenders are the smaller force. They begin packed in a block at the centre, arranged around their king, who stands on the throne. Their job is to get the king out through the ring and onto a winning square. The defenders are not trying to take the attackers apart; captures are a means, not the goal.
The attackers always move first. That is not a courtesy — it is part of the balance, because the defenders begin so tightly packed that several of their pieces have no legal move at all on the first turn.
How the pieces move
Every piece on the board, on both sides, moves in exactly the same way. There is one kind of soldier and one king, and the king moves like a soldier.
A piece slides in a straight line along a rank or a file, any number of empty squares, and stops on an empty square. That is the move of a rook in chess, and nothing else on the board moves any other way.
- Never diagonally. There are no diagonal moves in tafl at all.
- Never over another piece. A piece of either colour blocks the line, and the mover must stop short of it.
- Never onto another piece. Pieces are not taken by landing on them.
- One piece per turn, and a turn must be used — if you have a legal move you must make one.
Two squares limit where a soldier may stop. A soldier may not end its move on the throne, and in the codes where the corners are special it may not end its move on a corner either. It may, however, slide straight over the throne once the king has left it, treating it as an empty square in passing. Only the king may come to rest on those squares.
Capturing: the sandwich
Capture in tafl is custodial. You do not take a piece by landing on it. You take it by trapping it between two of yours, on opposite sides, along a rank or a file.
- Move one of your pieces so that it comes to rest next to an enemy soldier.
- Look at the square directly beyond that soldier, in the same straight line.
- If that square holds another of your pieces, the enemy soldier is captured and comes off the board at once.
Capture is also active, and this is the rule beginners most often get wrong. The sandwich only counts if you built it by moving. If an enemy already has two pieces standing on either side of an empty square, you may move a soldier into that square quite safely. Nothing happens. Your opponent has to move a piece into place to capture, and both of those pieces are already in place, so the trap cannot spring.
One move may capture on more than one side at once. A soldier that arrives between two separate sandwiches takes both enemy pieces; a soldier arriving at the meeting point of three takes three. Look at all four neighbours of the square you land on, every time.
Some squares can stand in for the second half of the sandwich. These are called hostile squares. In most of the rule sets here the empty throne is hostile, and so is each empty corner, and they are hostile to both sides. If you move a soldier so that an enemy soldier stands between it and an empty corner, the enemy soldier is captured just as if you had a piece standing there. The empty throne behaves the same way once the king has stepped off it.
The one wrinkle worth memorising: in every rule set on this site, while the king is still sitting on the throne, that square is hostile to the attackers only. Defenders may pin an attacker against the occupied throne; attackers may not pin a defender against it. As soon as the king leaves, the throne becomes hostile to everybody, and the defenders standing around it become suddenly loose.
The king
The king is one piece, and losing him loses the game. He moves like everyone else. He is armed in every rule set on this site, which means he counts as a defender for the purpose of making a sandwich: an attacker caught between the king and another defender is captured normally.
He is the only piece allowed to end a move on the throne, and, where corners are special, the only piece allowed to enter one.
How he is taken depends on the code, and this is the point on which the historical sources disagree most.
- All four sides
- Copenhagen, Fetlar, tawlbwrdd and Ard Ri. The attackers must hold all four squares orthogonally next to the king, counting a hostile square as one of the four. Because a king standing on the board edge only has three neighbours on the board, he cannot be taken there at all.
- Two sides, like anyone else
- Brandubh. The board is small, so the king is captured by an ordinary sandwich between two attackers, with an empty throne or an empty corner able to serve as one side of it.
- Four in the middle, two elsewhere
- Tablut. On the throne, or on any square next to it, the king needs all four of his neighbours covered — the empty throne counting as one of them. Anywhere else on the board he is taken by an ordinary two-piece sandwich.
How the game ends
The defenders win if they get the king to safety. Where safety is depends on the code: in Copenhagen, Fetlar, brandubh and Ard Ri he must reach one of the four corners, and in tawlbwrdd and tablut he must reach any square on the edge of the board, which is a far easier target and makes those games much faster.
The attackers win if they capture the king, by whichever rule their code uses.
Either side also wins if the other has no legal move at the start of its turn. Being completely blocked is a loss, not a stalemate.
Copenhagen adds three further endings that the other codes here do not have. They are explained in full on the Copenhagen rules page, and in short they are: a shieldwall, in which the attackers sweep a whole row of defenders off an edge; an edge fort, in which the defenders build a wall around the king on the edge that the attackers cannot break; and encirclement, in which the attackers close a ring so complete that no defender can reach the edge at all.
Repetition and games that go nowhere
Tafl positions can lock. A defender who is winning on material but cannot break out, or an attacker who cannot force the last door shut, may be tempted to shuffle for ever. Two rules stop that, and both apply to all six codes on this site.
- Repetition. If the same position is about to appear for the third time, the player who is about to bring it about must play something else. A player who has no other move, or who insists, loses the game. Repetition is not a draw here; it is a forfeit by the side that would not vary.
- No progress. If a hundred moves pass with no capture and no piece leaving or entering the ring in any way that changes the material, the game is declared drawn.
Genuine drawn games are rare. Tafl is a race between a small force trying to get out and a large one trying to shut the door, and one of the two almost always happens first.
What is different here
Everything above is the game as most people play it. Each rule set below changes something — sometimes a single win condition, sometimes the whole character of the game. Follow any of them for its full rules.
The modern tournament code: the standard 11x11 game plus three extra endings — the shieldwall, the edge fort and encirclement.
The plain 11x11 game: the same board and pieces as Copenhagen, with the shieldwall, the edge fort and encirclement all removed.
The Welsh game: plain corners with no special power, and a king who wins by reaching any square on the edge of the board.
The Sami 9x9 game from Linnaeus’ 1732 notebook: a smaller board, escape to any edge, and a king who is easier to take away from his throne than beside it.
The small Irish game on 7x7, where the king is captured by an ordinary two-piece sandwich like anybody else.
Ard Rí
Historical reconstructionA disputed 7x7 reconstruction in which every piece, the king included, moves exactly one square at a time.
Common questions
- Who moves first in hnefatafl?
- The attackers, in every rule set on this site. The defenders start so tightly packed that some of their pieces have no legal move on turn one, so the first move belongs to the larger army.
- Is it safe to move a piece between two enemy pieces?
- Yes. Capture in tafl is active: the trap only springs when a player moves a piece into place to close it. Walking into a gap between two enemies that are already standing there is completely safe.
- Can the king be captured on the edge of the board?
- In the codes that need all four sides covered — Copenhagen, Fetlar, tawlbwrdd and Ard Ri — no, because a king on the edge has only three neighbouring squares. In brandubh, and in tablut away from the throne, he can be, because two attackers are enough.
- Is hnefatafl related to chess?
- Only in the sense that both use a chequered board and take turns. The sides are unequal, the pieces are all identical, capture works by trapping rather than by taking, and the two games have no shared ancestor that anybody has demonstrated.