King's Table

We have now arrived at the point where my makes have overtaken my blog posts but I'm just going to witter on until things even out again.
So, Hnefatafl,  then.

     Sometimes referred to as Viking chess, Hnefatafl was once popular throughout all of northern Europe up until its popularity was eventually usurped by chess with its hierarchy of pieces appealling to the medieval mind (and who doesn't love the horsies). Boards and written records have been found all over from the Balinderry Board to the laws of Hywel Dda. I am told the name translates to King's Table, and it is actually the basis for the Discworld spin-off game Thud. It is also the head of a family of games known at Tafl games. The board looks like this...

Hnefatafl

The first thing you will notice, unless you're odd, is that the opposing sides are not opposite; instead the white pieces are ensconsed within a threatening ring of red pieces. The second thing you note is that the white pieces are vastly outnumbered, to the tune of two to one. Lastly you will probably note that the central white piece is different to the others. This is the only king on the board. All these features are common to, and define all Tafl games. 

Corner Square,
the Holy Grail

The rules of all Tafl games are remarkably similar as well, so by outlining the rules of Hnefatafl you will have the basics of all them. The aim of the game is different for both players, the white defender is trying to allow the King an escape, vikings clearly believing discresion to be the better part of valour. The red attackers are trying to stop him, as simple as that. All the pieces, without exception, move as rooks in chess. That is to say in a straight line orthogonally any number of squares as long as nothing blocks their path. They cannot pass through the centre square whether it is occupied or not. The king escapes by landing on any of the four corner squares, which red pieces are not allowed to enter. Pieces are taken as in Latrunculi, that is one piece must be surrounded on two sides orthogonally by opposing pieces. Unlike Latrunculi, however, the king must be surrounded on four sides, or on three sides with a board edge/centre square blocking the fourth side.

Sound straightforward? Simple? Oh, dear. That's what I thought at first, too. But I took a copy of a Tafl game, Tawlbwrdd, to an event recently and actually got a chance to play! Rather than setting things up for the public to play.

My Tawlbwrdd game.

That all important first move.

Tawlbwrdd is one of two Welsh tafl games and the only one thought to be unique to Wales. It is mentioned in the Laws of Hywel Dda in the tenth century as a job perk for Judges and mention crops up again and again until the thirteenth. It is one of the a larger member of the tafl family, although not perhaps as big as Alea Evangelii or Large Hnefatafl. It has four more defenders and eight more attackers to maintain the ratio and is played on an 11x11 board, because the board is bigger you only need to get the king to any edge square to win. From the games I played on the day I noticed that this does give white a distinct advantage.

In the three games I played on the day I played white only once and won only two out of the three games, once as red. The game above led to me having my backside handed to me by a member of another Re-enacting group, as she managed whether by luck and flaw or design to set up the equivalent of a rolling mill where I blocked the king, she took my piece, I moved a piece up, she opened a path for the king to the edge, I blocked the king, she took my piece, I moved a piece up, she opened a path for the king, I blocked the king and essentially kept this up with very little variation until I eventually ran out of pieces. It was like playing against a mincing machine. This could not have happened anywhere near as easily if she had to get the king to a corner. But thats war and Tafl and I even enjoyed being beaten, it has given me a tactic to try when I am next playing white.

Swedes!

The board construction is covered here. The construction of the pieces was easy although not too tidy to begin with. I simply used a floreat cutter, but in order to give a more pawny (is that a word? Should be) quality rolled a ball of clay and cut into that. It did take quite a few attempts to get right and the finished articles are a bit rough and ready but I quite like the whole look of cheap, cobbled together pieces, I feel they are more authentic for a peasant like me. And the abstract designs match some of those of the medieval and earlier periods as on display at Jon Crumiller's page.

Ludicrous and Truculent

This make is of a Roman game. I hear there here are some accounts of this game being played in Scandinavia in the middle ages and if ever I find them I will link them here. For now take that with a pinch of salt. What is certainly true is that there is a lot to be recognised in this game, the equal sided opposition of chess, the lack of heirarchy of the playing pieces as in draughts and the capturing method of the tafl games. The game is Ludus Latrunculorum,  or Latrunculi or Latrones, which means the Game of Brigands, or Bandits or Mercanaries or Soldiers.

Not a chess board.

When it came to making the game I already had the board! I covered this in a previous article (Article! He calls it an article now!) I picked up some Fymo cutters and some self drying clay, and cut out some simple shapes I think are called floreats out of the clay, eight of each to give a complete rank (Beg pardon? You heard.).

Floreat Cambrensis

 They didn't look quite right but I found a dot on each petal added something. 

Shall we play a game?

Latrunculi is a reconstructed game, in other words one which no-one genuinely knows how it was played. However we are not entirely clueless. Cleverer people than I, who call themselves ludologists, have studied long and hard using contemporary records, similar games,  two yoghurt pots and some sticky-backed plastic to produce what are to believed to be a fairly accurate approximation of the rules. Unfortunately ludologists tend to be academics and there is no money in amity, so there are several different versions of the rules, all of which are truly authentic and accurate; for a given value of authentic, accurate and true.

Ranks assembled

So from the literature there are several possible set ups. There are 7x8 boards, 8x8 with 8, 9, 13 and 16 pieces. As you can see I've gone here for an 8x8 board for convenience sake (it's handy to have a board that can be used for several games), and an eight-a-side set with an additional, smaller "Duke" on each side. There are also differences of opinions as regards some of the rules but there are a few things that all versions agree on is the movement of the pieces. All the pieces, regardless of rank, move in straight, orthogonal lines as far as the player wishes without passing over any other pieces (friend or foe); just like a rook in chess. But you do not take your opponent's pieces by simply moving into a square occupied by them (which would make for a game shorter than my attention sp- ooh, look! A squirrel!). Rather a single opponent's piece has to be surrounded on two sides (horizontal or vertical) to be taken .

Variants include;

• the Duke cannot be taken (so will be the last piece on the board) 
• the Duke can jump over a single opponent's piece as part of it's move
• the pieces can only move one square at a time (slooooooooooowww)
• at the begining of the the game the players take turns placing their pieces anywhere on the board (why not just play morris?)
• roll a dice each turn to determine how far a piece can move (WTF?)

The game ends when one side has been reduced to one piece (so cannot take), or a player cannot make a legitimate move or 30 moves have been made without a piece being taken.

In conclusion then this looks like a really nice little game, with a couple of variants should lift it a bit although others I could happily leave behind (you'll never guess which).

If you have been effected by anything in tonight's blog...

Latrunculi at Cyningstan with a downloadable pdf leaflet. The wonderfully knowledgable Damien Walker.
The Game Cabinet although this has not been updated in over ten years the site still seems to be up (for now). Scroll down to the bottom for Latrunculi.
Roman Board Games a nice little site that does what it says on the tin.

Mini make: Games Compendium

Mini-medieval came home from school the other day whilst I was making some items and wanted to make something too, Daddy. So I grabbed a spare strip of linen and some ordinary poster paint and let Drogo have a go. The result was a really nice trio of boards, really clear what they were and good brush control. Once the paint was dry it has proved incredibly durable to everything bar water.

Three little game boards, all in a row.

Madelinette

Knockings In and Out

Noughts and Crosses

Having had a go with brush and paint I then let him loose on the self drying clay. He chose to make simple cone pieces, or 

pointy ones

 so, with a little bit of guidance he made the following.

I was about to cut out the three boards, hem them and then make a seperate bag to carry them all in when once more the wife waded in with another excessively good idea (if this ganging up and outshining me continues words will need to be had). She simply suggested I made the strip into a bag like those over the shoulder record bags with the flap over the top.

You would think with all this sewing that my backstitch would improve. No such luck . So now junior has a little compendium of games he has made himself to keep him occupied on the recreation field whilst Mummy and Daddy are talking to the punters.

Link
Abakhan again. I'm trying to make up for the time I forgot them still.

I'm the Chairman of the Board.

This time around I have been exceptionally busy in anticipation of our first moot of the year at the end of January and in order to meet demand have created a production line of game boards. My intent was to make a number of different cloth boards for games using some modern equipment but hopefully techniques that would have been familiar to the medieval man. So here are my ingredients;

• solid block rubber stamps consisting of a 2x2 with foxed edges, 3x1 with straight edges and one large single (unused this time around)
• three ink pads, brown, burgundy and peach (again unused)
• a school geometry kit (to make me feel old)
• needles and thread (not pictured)
• and a couple of metres of coarse linen.

 

The reason for so much fabric? So I've got enough to make a complete hash of it and still recover in triumph.

 Hnefatafl

So to begin I set out to draw a 9x9 Hnefatafl outline using the 3x1 stamp, using the set square to allow me to get the angles right. As the more astute of you may no doubt have noticed by now this did not go wholly according to plan. I discovered that even with the set square the corners were just ever so slightly off which meant a very cramped central grid with overlapping squares. So I had to draw in demarkation lines on the grid with a Sharpie (very period), hopefully it will do as a spare for the children.

Rescued by Sharpie.

The next ones I built up a line at a time which proved a lot more successful as you will see from the picture below.

9x9 Hnefatafl

This Hnefatafl board is a simple 9x9 grid as commonly specified on the geek and elsewhere as one of the possible configurations for the game. Rather than creating a chequerboard pattern as per chess or draughts, picking out alternate squares in a contrasting colour, here I have chosen to pick out the starting squares of both sides in the game in the burgundy shade. 16 attackers around the outside and 8 defenders and one king on the centre square. From this I went on to make a second larger board for the Welsh variant Tawlbwrdd.

Tawlbwrdd

Tawlbwrdd, the Welsh connection.

As those of you who are more familiar with this variant will no doubt have noticed this is where I made my second mistake in the construction. I had miscounted the size of the grid and ended up with a 13x13 instead of an 11x11 board. However the light of my life in her inimitable, practical way said all I need do was mark the starting squares as per an 11x11 board and, at somepoint in the future, decorate the outer ranks and files to distinguish them as not part of the playing area. She is a genius.

 Latrunculi

Latrunculi

Finally I decided to make an 8x8 Latrunculi board (sometimes known as Ludus Latrunculorum) which although a Roman game did survive until the late medieval period. Now, as this is an 8x8 board I elected to make a standard chequerboard as this will work for a number of other games as well. I could have made an 8x7 board instead which was just as widely used but why cut off your nose to put mud in your eye. This then is my Latrunculi-come-Chess-come-Draughts board.

Hemmed.

So having printed all the boards quite neatly (eventually), the next obvious stage was to tidy up the edges by simply hemming them in with a quick back stitch.

Nice effect for six stitches.

I also wanted to highlight certain squares on the tafl boards such as the kings starting and finishing squares, short of using the Sharpie again as I had on the abortive first board. I considered carving a potato as a stamp until once more the flower of my desert came to my aid teaching me what I believe is called a daisy stitch. This simple stitch has allowed me to pick out a rough triquetra on certain of the squares with embroidery even I could do.

Eventually the idea will be to mount these cloths on wooden boards as probably would have been done in the middle-ages. This move will have to wait though until I have both wood and the glue with which to do it. The next stage however will be to make the playing pieces to go on these boards, and when I come to do that, I'll keep you posted.

Links

Crest Co-operative. The shop where I picked up the stamps.
Traditional Games. Really useful site.
Tawlbwrdd Great PDF from Damian Walker
Ludus Latrunculorum. Another of Damian Walker's great PDFs
Cyningstan A quick plug for Damien Walker's website where he sells a lot of thes games.
Game Cabinet Articles on Hnefatafl and Latrunculi.
www.heroarts.com Makers of my rubber stamps.
www.sharpie.co.uk  Occasionally useful