Tawlbwrdd: The Welsh Tafl Game
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Rules at a glance
- Every piece, king included, moves like a rook: any number of empty squares along a row or column.
- Capture a soldier by trapping it between two of your pieces along a row or column (custodian capture).
- The attackers make the first move.
- Armies: 24 attackers against 12 defenders plus the king.
- The defenders win when the king reaches any square on the board edge.
- The attackers win by capturing the king: he is flanked from two opposite sides, like a soldier.
- The king is armed: he can act as one side of a capturing sandwich.
This summary is generated from the same variant data the engine enforces. Details beyond it, such as throne behavior and special captures, follow the attestation in the fact box and the write-up below. Shared mechanics are covered in the rules reference.
Tawlbwrdd is the Welsh branch of the tafl family, played on a 11×11 board with 24 attackers against 12 defenders and a king. The name means “throw-board.” Wales documented it better than most: it appears in medieval law texts and in a 1587 manuscript that actually describes the setup.
The game the lawyers priced
Tawlbwrdd’s paper trail is unusually practical. Welsh legal texts in the tradition of Hywel Dda, the tenth-century lawgiver king, list the tawlbwrdd among valued possessions and set prices for board and pieces. Law codes don’t explain rules, but they tell you something rulebooks can’t: this game was ordinary furniture of Welsh noble life, common enough that courts needed to know what one was worth.
The second source is the good one. In 1587, a Welshman named Robert ap Ifan wrote a short description of tawlbwrdd, complete with a board drawing, in a manuscript now held at the National Library of Wales (Peniarth 158). He describes a king and twelve men facing twenty-four attackers who “lie in wait” to capture him, on a board of eleven lines. Confusingly, an earlier law-text passage implies a smaller game of a king with eight defenders against sixteen attackers, so the game’s scale may have grown over the centuries, or regional versions coexisted. Both readings float around the literature; the modern reconstruction follows Robert ap Ifan’s larger setup.
Note the date. 1587 is six centuries after the Viking age. Tafl games supposedly died out when chess arrived, and mostly they did, yet here’s a Welsh gentleman sketching one during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Like Sámi Tablut, tawlbwrdd shows the family surviving longest at the edges of Europe, away from the fashion centers where chess conquered first.
How Tawlbwrdd differs from Copenhagen
The two games share a scale: 11×11 matches Copenhagen’s board, and the armies are the same size, so tawlbwrdd feels immediately familiar if you’ve played the modern standard. It’s the closest historical relative Copenhagen has.
The differences sit in the details of reconstruction. Tawlbwrdd is played with an edge escape rather than Copenhagen’s corner escape, and it lacks Copenhagen’s modern machinery, the shieldwall capture and exit fort, because those were 2012 inventions, not sixteenth-century Welsh ones. The rules summary beside the board on this page reflects exactly what the engine enforces here.
That escape difference matters strategically. With the whole perimeter in play, the defenders on a big board become genuinely dangerous, and the attackers must hold a much longer line. Expect the defense to feel stronger here than in Copenhagen; that’s a property of the rule, not a bug in your play.
Who Tawlbwrdd suits
Players who already know Copenhagen and want to feel what one rule change does to a familiar board. Playing the two back to back is the best practical lesson in tafl design I know: same armies, same geography, completely different fear.
It’s also the natural pick if you’re drawn to the Welsh thread of the story, or if you find corner-escape games too locked down and want a big-board game with more open running.
Start a game on the homepage, see the whole family in the tafl games overview, or brush up in the rules reference first.
FAQ
What does tawlbwrdd mean?
“Throw-board” in Welsh, from tawl (throw) and bwrdd (board). The “throw” is puzzling for a game with no visible dice, and scholars have wondered whether dice once played some part or the name migrated from another game. No source settles it, so honest answer: meaning clear, reasoning lost.
How old is tawlbwrdd?
References in the Welsh law tradition attributed to Hywel Dda place the game in Wales by the central Middle Ages, with surviving law manuscripts from before 1250. It stayed alive long enough for Robert ap Ifan to describe it in 1587, an unusually long run for a tafl game.
Is tawlbwrdd just Welsh hnefatafl?
Effectively yes, in the way brandubh is Irish tafl: a local adaptation of the same game family, with its own name and its own recorded details. What makes tawlbwrdd special is the 1587 setup description, one of very few tafl documents written by someone who could have seen the game played.
Should I learn tawlbwrdd or Copenhagen first?
Copenhagen, if you want the tested competitive game and its learning resources; the strategy guides here assume it. Tawlbwrdd second, as the historical counterpoint on the same board. If you learn tawlbwrdd first, nothing is wasted; the mechanics transfer entirely.