Hnefatafl forum

I was looking at the Ockelbo picture stone and trying to think of a reason for the diagonal lines, and I had an idea, based on the (seemingly ludicrous?) notion that dice may have been involved in (some variants of) the game. How would the game play if before every move you rolled a four-sided die to decide which part of the board you could move a piece from? The areas being marked by the diagonal lines and numbered X-4 clock-wise, the squares sitting on the lines would belong to both areas covered by the square. When sitting on the throne, the king would always be allowed to move.

I'm thinking this would probably work best with few pieces and a small board, and should involve corner-escape, so perhaps the Brandubh rules would be best? Obviously this would introduce luck to the game, but should also give rise to some new strategies to manage that luck-factor. Perhaps it would be fun - might be worth trying out?

Another silly idea based on these pieces:


Disregarding the blue pieces to the left; what if the attackers massively outnumbered the defenders? Then perhaps the defenders not only moving one of their own pieces, but after that also one of the attackers' pieces on every turn would make the game balanced? There should be a rule against "undoing" the opponent's move.

OK time for some less mad ideas.

It feels kind of miraculous how well Brandub works, so I'm thinking perhaps this can be scaled down to even smaller boards? Normally we run into problems with the numer of pieces on such small boards, but what if we ditch the four-fold symmetry?

5x5 Hnefatafl


Now, I don't know what it would take to make this work, perhaps the Brandub capture-rules suffice? A super weak king?

But can we go further? What if we ditch even the two-fold symmetry?

3x3 Hnefatafl


This one I think would be unbalanced if the king could take part in captures, and I think other necessary innovations might be that the king has to reach the marked corner and then survive the opponents turn to win.


Now I don't know the game anywhere near well enough to be able to evaluate the rules properly, but I think the board layouts have some potential.