Hnefatafl forum

May 11th 2010 crust emailed me an explanation of the draw concept in the Hnefatafl Fetlar rules, which I'd like to share on the forum: ... white may as well try to break out and seize control of a corner, and then go for a draw if that fails, and black manages to complete the encirclement. The inter...

I will now try and get players from all sites to "cross-play". Thanks, good initiative! I wonder about the correspondence format - can't it sometimes be perceived an inconvenient way of playing a game? A tough game will in my experience typically take around 80 moves. With 3 days per correspondence...

The Marseille rules are the rules shown in HnefataflModern's demo videos . This variant has a number of small rule changes: - 9x9 board - unarmed king who wins on any edge square - no special corner squares - throne square is not hostile to anybody, and the king cannot return to the throne - no spec...

Here is my bid. Position 1: f4 and h6 can be captured. Hereafter no more whites are exposed, provided that the king remains on the throne. White uses f7 to make its compulsory moves. Position 2: The same as before, but f7 is missing so that white cannot do its compulsory moves without destroying the...

Some considerations in support of details in the Fetlar rules as tournament rules: Board size 11x11. An analysis of the latest ten games on the 9x9 board between experienced players (king wins on board edge) gives on the average 31 moves and an average game length 23 minutes (6 white wins, 4 black ...

crust wrote:The vikings put the rudder (steerboard) on the right hand side of the ship because they were mostly right-handed

I appreciate that the vikings would choose to normalize to the board quadrant in the rudder steerboard side!
The A1-quadrant is just the mathematician's way -

Very interesting list of openings, Roderich created. For identifying and analysing different opening moves and responses to these, would it be an idea to "normalize" the moves to the first quadrant of the board (a1-a6-f6-f1) ? As a hnefatafl board is eight-fold symmetric, fx. the opening moves d1-d3...

there is the potential in a tournament for white to refuse to enter into battle at all with the pictured monstrosity I like to call 'The Skulking King'. What about white wins: 1-0 black wins: 0-1 draw: 0-0 If the weakest player in a ten player tournament decides to cheat, using "The skulking King",...

Beadle wrote: The win:4 Draw:1 Lose:0 system sounds good, but perhaps excessive. Rather than a win counting for 4 points, I might set it at 3 points. I might not have any direct experience, but the math makes more sense to me that way, at least. We still want the draw option to have some value. Com...

There is in Lejre in Denmark a "Centre for Historical-Archaeological Research and Communication". Here archaeologists do live experiments like fx. building iron age houses as authentically as possible, families live iron age lives in the houses, and one day a house is burned down and left in ruins f...