What Hnefatafl Was
Hnefatafl is the Old Norse name of a board game in which one side guards a king in the middle of the board and a larger side tries to trap him. It belongs to the tafl family of games and is known in English as Viking chess, though it is not chess, which only reached the North around 1100. The board above plays a modern version of it.
The name splits into hnefi and tafl. Cleasby and Vigfússon's Old Icelandic dictionary of 1874 gives hnefi first as "the fist" and second as the king piece in this game. Tafl is an early loan from Latin tabula and is used of almost any board game. Hnefatafl is the game of the hnefi: a word for the fist that also named the king piece.
What the Sagas Say
Most saga references say only tafl, which could be any board game. Even the gods in Völuspá play at tafl, the general word. A handful of texts do name it. In Morkinskinna, written down in the first half of the 13th century, King Sigurðr of Norway boasts that he is stronger and swims better, and his brother and co-king Eysteinn answers: tefli ek hneftafl betr. Era þat minna vert en afl þitt, "I play hneftafl better. That is worth no less than your strength." They ruled in the early 12th century, after the Viking Age, and this is a saga scene, not a transcript.
The riddle contest in Hervarar saga comes closest to describing play. Gestumblindi asks about brides who fight around a weaponless lord, the darker shielding him, the fairer going forth. The answer in manuscript R, copied in the late 14th or early 15th century, is hnettafl: "the darker ones defend the hnefi, and the white ones attack." That is the core of the game in one line. Our board has the colors the other way around. The riddle gives no numbers, and the manuscripts spell the game hnettafl or hneftafl, never hnefatafl.
In ch. 70 of Grettis saga, written around 1310 to 1320, Þorbjörn öngull is playing hnettafl, which the saga calls a big halatafl, a "tail board" whose pieces had a peg underneath. None of these texts gives rules.
The Boards and Pieces That Survive
A 10th-century man's grave at Baldursheimur in Iceland held 24 gaming pieces turned from sea-mammal tooth, a die cut from the leg bone of a cow or horse, and a small whalebone king who squats on a base and holds his long forked beard in both hands. No board was found. The National Museum of Iceland's display text is plain about it: "The rules… are not known."
Only one complete board with a known grid survives from the period, and it is small: the yew Ballinderry gaming board from County Westmeath, with seven rows of seven peg holes. Its carving is partly Scandinavian in style, though it was probably made in Ireland. Our brandubh game takes its board size from it, and that page tells the board's story.
Everything else is a fragment or a drawing. One oak plank from the Gokstad burial in Norway (around 900 to 905) has been reconstructed as 13 by 13. A plank from Coppergate in York was probably part of a 15 by 15 board. The Alea evangelii, a "gospel game" in an Irish gospel book of 1140 to 1199 (Corpus Christi College Oxford MS 122), draws a king-in-the-center game of the same family on 19 by 19 points, as a Christian allegory. A 9 by 9 board is known only from Linnaeus's sketch of 1732. An 11 by 11 layout is reported from a drawing in Robert ap Ifan's Welsh manuscript of 1587, as transcribed by F.R. Lewis in 1943. Sizes ran from 7 by 7 to 19 by 19, and no Viking-Age board of 11 by 11 has been excavated.
How to Play Hnefatafl: The Copenhagen Rules
The game on this page plays the Copenhagen rules for 11 by 11, set out in 2012 by Aage Nielsen of Denmark, Adam Bartley of Norway and Tim Millar of the UK. They are a modern design, not a recovered Viking rulebook.
Setup and moves. The king starts on the throne, the center square, with 12 defenders around him. The 24 attackers, twice as many, stand in four groups of six at the middle of each edge. The attackers move first, then the sides take turns. Every piece moves like a rook in chess, any distance along a row or column, never diagonally and never jumping.
Restricted squares. Only the king may stop on the throne or a corner. Any piece may pass over the empty throne, and the king may go back to it.
Capturing. Trap an enemy piece between two of yours on a row or column and it is removed. A corner can stand in for one of your two pieces, and so can the empty throne. With the king on it, the throne still counts against attackers but not against defenders. Only the move that closes the trap captures, so a piece may move in between two enemies safely. The king can be one of the two capturing pieces. The board edge does not count as an enemy. Our reading: one move can capture in several directions at once.
Winning. The king's side wins when the king reaches a corner. The attackers win by surrounding the king on all four sides, or on his three open sides when he stands next to the throne. He cannot be captured on the board edge. The attackers also win if they close an unbroken ring around the king and all his remaining defenders. A side that cannot move loses.
Shieldwall. A row of two or more pieces along the edge, each with an enemy directly in front of it, is captured all at once when the enemy closes both ends of the row. A corner can close one end. The king can take part in closing a shieldwall but is never captured by one, though the defenders in the row with him are.
Where we had to choose. The rules make perpetual repetition a loss for White without defining White. We read White as the king's side: a position seen a third time loses for the defenders. The rules call a game that cannot be finished a draw; we declare one after 160 moves without a capture, counting each side's move separately. The rules also give the defenders a win when the king sits on the edge inside a fort the attackers can never break. Our game does not detect forts. Build one and play goes on, and since a third repetition loses for the defenders, a king who only shuffles inside his fort can lose that way before the 160-move draw. How the computer spots an encirclement is our own method too.
Why Modern Rule Sets Exist
No Viking wrote the rules down. H.J.R. Murray, in A History of Chess (1913), reports that the scholar Willard Fiske spent several years trying to recover the game and "gave the problem up as insoluble." The fullest old rule set is Carl Linnaeus's Latin notes of 1732 on the Sami game tablut, a 9 by 9 game in which the king escapes to any edge. You can play it on our tablut page.
Murray worked from the 1811 English translation of those notes, which reverses the rule on taking the king, and he followed the English. Later writers on tafl took Murray's version as their starting point. Two modern 11 by 11 sets, the Fetlar rules of 2007 from the Fetlar Hnefatafl Panel and the Copenhagen rules of 2012, both surround the king on four sides to take him. That rule stands in the tradition that runs back through Murray, and it is the rule authors' own design. The whole chain is on our hnefatafl sources and corrections page.
Who Tends to Win
We have no measured win rate for either side, and we will not make one up. The rules only show what each side has to work with. Under Copenhagen the king has only four exits, the corners, but he cannot be taken on the edge and almost everywhere needs attackers on all four sides. In tablut he can leave by any of the 32 edge squares, but two Muscovites can take him almost anywhere.
Against our computer, the level you pick sets the difficulty. Easy looks one move ahead, normal up to three, and hard searches deeper with a longer time limit.
Hnefatafl FAQ
How do you play hnefatafl (Viking chess)?
On an 11 by 11 board, the king starts on the central throne with 12 defenders, and 24 attackers wait at the edges and move first. Every piece moves like a rook. You capture by trapping an enemy between two of your pieces, or against a corner or the empty throne. The king wins by reaching a corner. The attackers win by surrounding him on four sides, or on three beside the throne, and he cannot be taken on the board edge.
Did the Vikings play chess?
There is no authentic record of chess in Scandinavia before the 12th century. Chess reached the North around 1100 and in time took over from the older tafl games. The saga story of King Knútr (Cnut the Great) playing chess in 1027 was written by Snorri around 1230, and scholars have suspected that he swapped chess in for hnefatafl.
Is this the original Viking version of the game?
No. No Viking rules survive, and the National Museum of Iceland says of its own 10th-century set that the rules are not known. This page plays the Copenhagen rules, a modern design from 2012. The fullest old rule set is Linnaeus's 1732 notes on the Sami game tablut.
Which side wins more often in hnefatafl?
We have no measured figure, so we will not give one. Under the Copenhagen rules the king has only four corners to aim for, but he cannot be taken on the edge and almost everywhere needs four attackers around him. Your record against each computer level is kept in your browser.
Is this hnefatafl game free?
Yes. There is no account, no email and nothing to install. The game runs in your browser on a phone or a computer and saves an unfinished game on your device.
Can two people play on one phone?
Yes. Choose Two players on the start screen and pass the phone between moves. The bar above the board says whose turn it is. The board does not turn around. Undo takes back one move.