Tablut

Tablut

Players 2-2
Length 45 minutes
Equipment Required one standard piecepack
Designer Traditional adapted by TrevorLDavis
Version 1.1
Version Date 2022-02-19
License CC BY-SA 4.0

Description

Tablut is a historical (hnefa)tafl game played by the Sámi people until at least the 1700s whose rules were written down by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus in 1732.

The game is played by two players one of which controls 16 "attackers" and other who controls 8 "defenders" plus a "king". There is also a "castle" in the center of the board (some modern derivatives also have special corners). There are multiple schemes that can be used to play this game. Visualized below is one scheme ("ranks" versus "suits") which gives the attacking player all the coin faces of rank 2,3,4,5 as the attackers and gives the defending player the remaining coin backs as defenders plus a pawn as the king and use 1-4 piecepack dice as the "castle" (place the pawn on top of the dice to start the game). Another scheme could be for the defenders to be four coin "aces" and four coin "moons" plus a "moons" pawn king versus the remaining coin backs as attackers (with a traditional piecepack this give you black-colored coin defenders plus a black-colored pawn versus non-black-colored coin attackers).

 Tablut setup
Tablut setup

Rules

Example game

An example game recorded in PortablePiecepackNotation:

---
GameType: Tablut
...
1. a4-a3 1... c5-c3 2. d1-d3 2... e7-c7
3. f1-f3;*e3 3... e4-e3;*d3 4. f9-f7 4... g5-g3;*f3
5. h5-g5 5... d5-d1 6. d9-d3 6... f5-f1;*e1 
7. a3-b3;*c3 7... c7-c3;*d3 8. i4-e4;*e3 8... g3-e3;*e4
9. i5-i4 9... e5-f5 10. i6-f6 10... f5-f4
11. a5-a4 11... f4-g4 12. e2-g2 12... e3-g3
13. f6-f4 13... e6-e4;*f4 14. f7-f4 14... g4-h4
15. f4-g4;*h4
 Animation of a game of Tablut
Animation of a game of Tablut

View game in PPN viewer

License

The linked piecepack rule sheets/pamphlets are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Reviews and Comments


CategoryGame MechanicRectangularBoardCategory