About Viking Chess
Viking Chess – or tafl, as the Vikings themselves called it – is the old board game of the North. It was played all over Scandinavia long before chess arrived, and boards and pieces have been found in Viking graves. On GameBase, the iPad sits between you, and the player at the top gets their name and status facing them.
The game is lopsided on purpose: one player has a king and twelve defenders in the middle, the other has 24 attackers around the edges. The king wins by escaping to a corner, and the attackers win by capturing him. All pieces move like rooks in chess, and you capture an enemy by sandwiching it between two of your own.
Choose between Hnefatafl on 11 × 11 squares with the modern Copenhagen rules and the smaller Tablut on 9 × 9, based on Carl Linnaeus’s notes from Lapland in 1732. You decide whether the king has to be captured from four sides or between two, whether he has to reach a corner or just the edge, and whether the shieldwall rule is on.
How to play
- Type in your names, and choose the board and rules. The bottom player attacks first, and in the next round you swap roles.
- Tap one of your pieces, then tap one of the yellow squares. Pieces move straight forwards or sideways as far as they like, but not over other pieces.
- Sandwich an enemy between your piece and one of your own – or an empty corner or the empty throne – to capture it.
- The defenders win when the king reaches a corner. The attackers win when the king is captured, or when all the defenders are surrounded.