Hnefatafl Rules: How to Play the Viking Game

Hnefatafl rules in brief: two unequal sides share one board. Every piece moves like a chess rook. You capture by sandwiching an enemy piece between two of yours. The defenders win if their king reaches a corner square; the attackers win by surrounding the king. Attackers always move first. The rest is detail, and the detail is below.

This page uses Copenhagen Hnefatafl, the modern competitive standard, as its default and flags where the other variants differ. If you’d rather learn by doing, the interactive tutorial teaches the same rules on a live board.

The board and the armies

Copenhagen is played on a 11×11 board. Five squares are special: the throne in the center, where the king begins, and the four corner squares. These restricted squares can only be occupied by the king. The setup diagram on this page shows the starting position; the setup guide explains the arrangement for each variant.

The attacking side fields 24 soldiers, starting in four groups at the board edges. The defense fields 12 soldiers plus the king, starting in a cross around the throne. Yes, the attackers have roughly double the material. The sides have different jobs, and the game is balanced around that asymmetry, not despite it.

Turn order and movement

The attackers move first, then turns alternate, one move each. (The reasoning behind this convention has its own short page.)

Movement is a single rule with no exceptions: any piece may move any number of empty squares in a straight line along a row or column. No diagonals, no jumping. The king moves exactly like every other piece.

Restricted squares add two footnotes. Nothing but the king may ever land on the throne or a corner. Any piece may pass over the throne when it’s empty, sliding through without stopping.

Capturing

You capture an enemy soldier by trapping it between two of your pieces on directly opposite sides, along a row or column. This is called custodian capture, and three consequences follow from how it’s worded.

Captures happen only on the aggressor’s move. If you voluntarily move your piece between two enemies, nothing happens; the sandwich must close on the capturing player’s turn. This is the rule beginners get wrong most often, in both directions.

One move can capture several pieces. If your move closes sandwiches in two or three directions at once, every trapped piece comes off.

The restricted squares fight for both sides against soldiers. The four corners, and the empty throne, are hostile: an enemy soldier trapped between your piece and a hostile square is captured. In Copenhagen, the throne is hostile to attackers even when the king stands on it, but hostile to defenders only when empty.

Copenhagen adds the shieldwall capture: a row of soldiers pinned along the board edge can be captured all at once by bracketing both ends of the row, if each pinned piece has an enemy directly in front of it. A corner square may serve as one bracket. Full worked examples of every capture pattern, including this one, are in the capturing guide.

Captured pieces leave the board permanently. There is no promotion, no return, no mercy.

The king: escape and capture

Everything special in hnefatafl concentrates on one piece.

The defenders win the moment the king reaches any corner square. That is their entire victory condition. Sacrificing every defender to open the road is a perfectly sound plan if the king walks it.

Capturing the king takes more than a sandwich. In Copenhagen he must be surrounded on all four orthogonal sides by attackers, or on three sides with the throne as the fourth wall. He cannot be captured against the board edge. And he is armed: the king can act as one jaw of a capturing sandwich against enemy soldiers, exactly as if he were a soldier himself.

Copenhagen also grants the defense the exit fort: if the king stands on the board edge inside a fort of defenders that the attackers cannot break, with at least one empty square to move to, the defense wins. In the other direction, if the attackers surround every remaining defender with an unbroken ring, the attackers win even without capturing the king. The king guide covers all of this in depth.

Repetition is resolved sharply rather than drawn: a player who repeats a position perpetually loses, with the burden on the defenders. Stalling is not a defensive resource.

Where the variants differ

The six games on this site share every rule above except where noted here. Piece counts and board sizes vary by variant (each variant page shows its own setup and engine-generated rules summary). The rule differences that change how the game feels:

• Escape squares. Copenhagen uses corner escape. The traditional reconstructions here, Tablut, Brandubh, Tawlbwrdd, and the giant Alea Evangelii, use the escape rule shown on their pages; where the king escapes to an edge, the attackers must guard the whole perimeter, which strengthens the defense considerably.
• King capture. The four-sided royal capture is Copenhagen’s. Smaller traditional variants generally use a weaker king who is easier to take, so he must be screened by his soldiers rather than marched into the open.
• Modern rules. The shieldwall, exit fort, and strict repetition penalties exist only in Copenhagen; they were added in 2012 to fix balance problems. The historical variants play without them.

When in doubt, trust the rules panel beside the game board. It’s generated from the engine that enforces the rules, so it can’t drift out of date the way a prose page can.

From rules to playing well

Knowing the rules gets you to move one. What to actually do with them is the strategy hub’s territory, with dedicated guides for attackers and defenders, and a summary of both sides’ plans in how to win. Or skip theory and go lose a few games on the homepage; it’s faster.