Hnefatafl

Hnefatafl, also called tafl, names a family of ancient Northern European strategy board games played on a checkered or latticed board by two sides with uneven numbers of pieces, one side defending a king piece that must escape to the board's edge and the other attacking to capture it first. Variants recorded under the tafl name include hnefatafl itself, tablut, tawlbwrdd, brandubh, Ard Ri, and alea evangelii, and the games were played across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Britain, Ireland, and the Sami regions. Their development is thought to have been influenced by the Roman game latrunculi during the medieval period. Chess gradually supplanted tafl games across most of the region by the twelfth century, though the Sami variant tablut remained in play at least into the eighteenth century. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus recorded tablut's rules in 1732, and an 1811 English translation of that record, despite containing errors, became the basis for the modern family of reconstructed tafl games played today, alongside a more recently retranslated version of Linnaeus's original rules.