hnefatafl and the quest for balance
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 11:17 am
It's a strange thing, if you think about it. We have chosen one of the very few board games which features complete asymmetry, both in the aims of the two players, and in the size of their forces. Then we spend the whole time trying to find the most evenly balanced variation! Well, of course an unbalanced game is not going to be all that much fun to play, nor is one that always ends in a draw. But we persist because it is precisely this asymmetry which makes the Tafl family of games so intriguing.
There's been a lot of discussion on this forum about which version is the most balanced (not all of it as good-humoured as it might have been). We have these statistics to go on:
Fetlar rules: win for white 44 %, black 39 %, draw 17 % (source: Roderich's analysis of our tournament here)
Rachunek or Marseille rules: white 58.26%, black 39.17%, draw 2.56% (source: Brainking.com http://brainking.com/en/GameRules?tp=19 ... !g=5357760 )
This evidence suggests that Fetlar is better balanced in terms of the winning chances of the two players, though Rachunek has far fewer draws.
So, some questions follow. Will our quest for balance in hnefatafl eventually lead to a situation where every game is a draw? Is it worth giving up some of the fairness in order to reduce the number of draws? Or should the "drawishness" of hnefatafl be something we can actually embrace, even celebrate ? (Ok, I admit it, I love draw forts!) Is there some combination of the game variables we haven't tried yet still out there waiting to be found, a game with perfect balance and few draws? Or are we going to have to accept imperfection, and adopt whichever version we like better, based on personal preference?
There's been a lot of discussion on this forum about which version is the most balanced (not all of it as good-humoured as it might have been). We have these statistics to go on:
Fetlar rules: win for white 44 %, black 39 %, draw 17 % (source: Roderich's analysis of our tournament here)
Rachunek or Marseille rules: white 58.26%, black 39.17%, draw 2.56% (source: Brainking.com http://brainking.com/en/GameRules?tp=19 ... !g=5357760 )
This evidence suggests that Fetlar is better balanced in terms of the winning chances of the two players, though Rachunek has far fewer draws.
So, some questions follow. Will our quest for balance in hnefatafl eventually lead to a situation where every game is a draw? Is it worth giving up some of the fairness in order to reduce the number of draws? Or should the "drawishness" of hnefatafl be something we can actually embrace, even celebrate ? (Ok, I admit it, I love draw forts!) Is there some combination of the game variables we haven't tried yet still out there waiting to be found, a game with perfect balance and few draws? Or are we going to have to accept imperfection, and adopt whichever version we like better, based on personal preference?