Is hnefatafl the same as chess?

No. Hnefatafl is a separate, older Northern European game. The sides are unequal, captures work by sandwiching, and the king wins by escaping rather than losing by checkmate. The two games are compared in detail on hnefatafl vs chess.

Is hnefatafl still played today?

Yes. Players compete online, mostly under the Copenhagen rules drawn up in 2012 by Aage Nielsen, Adam Bartley, and Tim Millar, and those rules have been used for world championship tournaments since 2013.

Is hnefatafl hard to learn?

The rules are simpler than chess: one kind of move, one kind of capture, and a special king. The hard part is strategy, because each side needs its own plan. The learning page covers what trips beginners up.

Which side has the advantage?

It depends on the ruleset. In Copenhagen online play the defenders win somewhat more often, but the gap shrinks among strong players. Some older rules make the king very hard to stop. The details are on is hnefatafl balanced.

What Is Hnefatafl? The Viking Board Game Explained

Hnefatafl is a two-player strategy board game from Viking Age Scandinavia, often called Viking chess. One player has a king and a small band of defenders in the middle of the board; the other has an army twice that size around the edges, and the game is a race between the king’s escape and his capture.

Hnefatafl at a glance

What it is: an asymmetric war game. The two sides have different armies and different goals.
Who played it: the Norse, and the people they traded with and settled among, from Norway and Iceland to Ireland and Sápmi (Lapland).
When: it was established across Scandinavia by the Viking Age, roughly 800 to 1000 AD. Chess pushed it out from the twelfth century on.
How to say it: “NEFF-ah-tah-fell.” The pronunciation page breaks it down.
Where to play it now: on this site’s homepage, against the computer or a friend, free.

How hnefatafl is played

Here’s the whole game in one paragraph. In the modern Copenhagen version, the board is 11×11. The king starts on the central square, the throne, surrounded by 12 defenders, and 24 attackers wait in groups along the four edges. The attackers move first. Every piece slides any number of empty squares in a straight line, like a rook in chess. You capture an enemy piece by trapping it between two of yours on opposite sides. The defenders win if the king reaches one of the four corner squares. The attackers win if they trap the king, normally by surrounding him on all four sides.

That’s it. You can learn the rules in five minutes and spend years on the strategy, because the two sides feel like different games. Attacking is patient net-building. Defending is a jailbreak. The full details, including edge cases like the shieldwall capture, are on the hnefatafl rules page.

Who played it, and how we know

No Viking wrote the rules down. What survives is hardware, and a lot of it.

A double-sided wooden board from the Gokstad ship burial in Norway, dated to around 900, has a tafl grid on one face and a Nine Men’s Morris board on the other. A tenth-century grave at Baldursheimur in northern Iceland held a set of gaming pieces with a small whalebone king, a seated figure holding his long beard; it’s now in the National Museum of Iceland. In Ireland, excavators at Ballinderry crannog in 1932 found a yew board with a 7x7 grid of peg holes and Scandinavian-style carving.

Written sources show how much the game mattered. In the Orkneyinga saga, Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson lists his nine skills in verse, and tafl comes first.

The rules we play today are reconstructions. The main source is Carl Linnaeus, who recorded the Sámi game tablut on his 1732 trip to Lapland. The history page follows the game from ship burials to its long disappearance and modern revival.

What “hnefatafl,” “tafl,” and “Viking chess” mean

Tafl is Old Norse for a board or table, and it was the general word for board games. Today it names the whole family of king-escape games.

Hnefatafl is one member of that family: tafl plus hnefi, the name of the king piece. The usual gloss is “the king’s board game.” Hnefi is related to the word for “fist,” which is why you’ll also see “fist table.” The hnefatafl meaning page sorts out which parts of that are solid and which are guesswork.

Viking chess is a modern nickname. Hnefatafl isn’t related to chess; it earned the name by filling the same slot in Norse life that chess filled later. The nickname also gets stuck on Kubb, a Swedish lawn game, so the Viking chess page explains which is which.

Hnefatafl variants

Because the game traveled, it grew local forms. Six are playable on this site:

Copenhagen Hnefatafl, 11×11: the modern competitive standard, finished in 2012 and used for world championship play since 2013.
Tablut, 9×9: the Sámi game Linnaeus wrote down.
Brandubh, 7×7: the small, fast Irish version.
Tawlbwrdd, 11×11: the Welsh variant.
Ard Rí, 7×7: a Scottish variant.
Alea Evangelii, 19×19: a huge board known from a medieval manuscript drawing.

The tafl games page compares them side by side. If you’re new, start with Brandubh for a quick game or Copenhagen for the version most people play online.

Where to play hnefatafl

Right here. The homepage runs Copenhagen Hnefatafl in your browser against an AI opponent with five difficulty levels, or two players on one screen. There’s no account and nothing to install. If you’d rather learn by doing, the interactive tutorial walks you through the rules one move at a time.