A number of 7×7 boards have been found, the most famous being the elaborate wooden board found at Ballinderry in 1932, featuring holes for pegged pieces, possibly to allow for portability of the game. From two poems it is known that it was played with five men against eight, and that one of the five was a "Branán", or chief. Brandubh īrandubh (or brandub) ( Irish: bran dubh) was the Irish form of tafl. This is the least documented of the known tafl variants. The manuscript describes the layout of the board as a religious allegory, but it is clear that this was a game in the Tafl family.Īrd Rí (Gaelic: High King) was a Scottish tafl variant played on a 7×7 board with a king and eight defenders against sixteen attackers. It was played on the intersections of a board of 18×18 cells.
Īlea evangelii, which means "game of the gospels", was described, with a drawing, in the 12th-century Corpus Christi College, Oxford manuscript 122, from Anglo-Saxon England. Hnefatafl and Tawlbwrdd) may have employed dice. There is some controversy over whether some tafl games (i.e. Although the size of the board and the number of pieces varied, all games involved a distinctive 2:1 ratio of pieces, with the lesser side having a king-piece that started in the centre. The only variant of tafl where a relatively unambiguous ruleset has survived into modern times is tablut, the Sámi variant of the game which was recorded by Linnaeus during his Expedition to Lapland in 1732.Īs for the medieval game, no complete, unambiguous description of the rules exists, but the king's objective was to escape to (variously) the board's periphery or corners, while the greater force's objective was to capture him. This popular medieval game was played with equal forces on each side and thus was not a tafl variant, but rather may have been the medieval descendant of the Roman game Latrunculi or Ludus latrunculorum. The Welsh equivalent was Gwyddbwyll and the Breton equivalent Gwezboell all terms mean "wood-sense". Fidchell or Fithcheall ( Modern Irish: Ficheall) was played in Ireland. Skáktafl is the Old Norse name for chess. Kvatrutafl is the Old Norse name for Tables (the medieval forerunner of Backgammon).
Halatafl is the Old Norse name for Fox and Geese, a game dating from at least the 14th century. Several games may be confused with tafl games, due to the inclusion of the word tafl in their names or other similarities. It is not known if the Anglo-Saxons had a specific name for the game or if they generically referred to it as tæfl in the way that modern people might refer to "cards". In Anglo-Saxon England, the term tæfl also referred to many board games. The precise etymology is not entirely certain but hnefi certainly referred to the king-piece, and several sources refer to Hnefatafl as "King's table". The specific name Hnefatafl possibly arose as meaning "board game of the fist", from hnefi ("fist") + tafl, where "fist" referred to the central king-piece. Hnefatafl (roughly, plausibly realised as ), became the preferred term for the game in Scandinavia by the end of the Viking Age, to distinguish it from other board games, such as Skáktafl ( chess), Kvatrutafl ( Tables) and Halatafl ( Fox games), as these became known. The term tafl ( Old Norse: "table", "board" pronounced ) is the original Norse name of the game.
Most probably they are based upon the Roman game Ludus latrunculorum. Tafl games ( pronounced, also known as hnefatafl games) are a family of ancient Nordic and Celtic strategy board games played on a checkered or latticed gameboard with two armies of uneven numbers.