Hnefatafl Pieces: Types, Counts, and Real Finds
Piece counts by variant
| Variant | Board | Attackers | Defenders | King | Total pieces |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copenhagen Hnefatafl | 11×11 | 24 | 12 | 1 | 37 |
| Tablut | 9×9 | 16 | 8 | 1 | 25 |
| Brandubh | 7×7 | 8 | 4 | 1 | 13 |
| Tawlbwrdd | 11×11 | 24 | 12 | 1 | 37 |
| Ard Rí | 7×7 | 8 | 4 | 1 | 13 |
| Alea Evangelii | 19×19 | 48 | 24 | 1 | 73 |
Hnefatafl uses three kinds of piece and no more: the king, his defenders, and the attackers. In Copenhagen Hnefatafl that means one king, 12 defenders, and 24 attackers, with other variants scaling the same trio up or down. Every piece moves identically; only the king has special rules.
Three piece types, one movement
Chess needs six piece types to generate its complexity; tafl generates its own from asymmetry instead. All pieces slide like rooks, along ranks and files as far as the road is open. What distinguishes them is allegiance and one exceptional individual: the king can occupy the restricted squares, wins the game by escaping, takes extra effort to capture, and (in Copenhagen) fights in captures like any soldier. His full dossier is the king page; everything pieces do to each other is the capturing guide.
The Old Norse name for the king piece was hnefi, and the game is named for him, hnefatafl, the hnefi’s board. Soldiers went by hunn, among other terms. That the king alone got the game named after him tells you the medieval players saw it the way we do: one piece is the game.
How many pieces per variant
The attacker-to-defender ratio is the family constant: two to one, before counting the king. The exact armies for each variant are in the reference table on this page, from Brandubh’s little war of 13 pieces up to Alea Evangelii’s 73. Copenhagen and Tawlbwrdd share the biggest common size, 24 against 12 plus king; Tablut fields 16 against 8 plus king.
Buying or building a set, the practical takeaway: a Copenhagen-sized set covers the 11×11 variants, and its armies can be borrowed downward for the smaller games. Sets sold with equal armies, and they exist, are wrong for every tafl game ever documented.
The pieces the Vikings actually held
Museum cases hold the good stuff, and three finds are worth knowing by name.
The Baldursheimur king, from a tenth-century burial in Iceland, is the icon: a small whalebone man seated with his hands gripping his beard, found alongside a set of walrus-ivory playing pieces and a die. He’s among the very few Viking Age gaming kings carved as an actual person, and once you’ve seen him, every abstract king piece since looks like his descendant.
Birka, the Swedish trading town, yielded tenth-century sets including pieces of glass, imported, expensive, and a reminder that fine gaming sets were wealth display. Grave finds there and elsewhere show kings distinguished from soldiers by size, material, or a crown-like knob, with soldiers as plain hemispheres, the same visual grammar modern sets still use.
And the pegged pieces implied by the Ballinderry board’s holes show the practical end of the craft: pieces that couldn’t slide off a lap or a ship’s bench. Materials across the corpus run from bone, antler, and amber to jet, stone, and simple wood; most players clearly used humble pieces, and the humble pieces mostly rotted away. The boards these pieces stood on have their own page, and the games’ full story is at hnefatafl history.
For play today, the engine on the homepage renders the counts above exactly, and the printable sheets supply paper armies for the table.
FAQ
How many pieces do you need for hnefatafl?
For the standard Copenhagen game: 24 attackers, 12 defenders, and one king. Smaller variants need fewer, down to Brandubh’s 13 total. The table on this page lists every variant; any set with a two-to-one army ratio plus a distinct king can be adapted.
What were original hnefatafl pieces made of?
Bone, antler, wood, amber, glass, walrus ivory, jet, and stone, in rough order from common to costly. Kings were marked out by size, figuration, or ornament, like the bearded whalebone king from Baldursheimur. Glass pieces, often imported, marked serious wealth in grave finds.
Are attackers and defenders different pieces?
Only in color and count; they move and capture identically. The asymmetry lives in numbers and goals, not abilities. Sets conventionally make attackers dark and defenders light, a habit at least as old as Linnaeus’s 1732 account, where dark “Muscovites” besieged light “Swedes.”
Can I use chess pieces to play hnefatafl?
In a pinch: pawns of each color as the two armies, borrowing extras from a second set for the attacker surplus, and a chess king as the hnefi. The board is the bigger problem, since chess’s 8x8 has no center square; see the board guide for workarounds.