Pyrographic Hnefatafl Board

During the pandemic, a close friend of mine introduced me to the ancient Viking board game of Hnefatafl- popular during the Middle Ages, the game fell out of popularity as chess was introduced to the region. The original rules for the game have been lost to history, requiring game historians to try and recreate the rules from similar games played more recently.

Hnefatafl has also presented an interesting discussion point in the realm of ‘solved’ games, i.e. those which have a pre-determined ending based on optimal play. The simplest example is Tic-Tac-Toe, where proper play guarantees a draw, but even more complex games like chess are hypothetically solvable. Hnefatafl’s board is small, with few rules for how pieces move and full game information, points towards this being a possibility.

What makes Hnefatafl particularly fascinating, is that each player is assigned a different objective at the game’s start- one player is attempting to surround the large “king” piece, while the other tries to defend the king and safely escort them off the board. These dual objectives are relatively rare amongst games, and even rarer in a situation where information is so well known.

As a longtime lover of board games, history, and the computational possibilities of this game, I sought out a version of my own. The game is not widely distributed, however, and so I instead took it upon myself to build my own board, using wood that I hand-cut, sanded, and hand-decorated using a pyrography pen.