May 2010 Tim Millar ("crust"), UK, and Adam Bartley ("Adam"), Norway, joined and recommended the "Fetlar Hnefatafl 11x11", which was added. (From 178 Skalk Hnefatafl 11x11 test games we measured the attackers to win four times more often than the defenders!)Īnd did the discussions about tafl take off!!Īpril 2010 "Darkont" from reenactor club Ulvgard, Russia, advised to have the king captured from 4 sides instead of 2, and the "Old Hnefatafl 11x11" was added. Now, however, skilled opponents appeared on the net and it was practically impossible to win the defenders' side. The first many years of this site "Hnefatafl" was seen as "Skalk Hnefatafl" as we'd learnt in Denmark as the only option. Those dots must be a lot of people interested in hnefatafl, and would it be fun to let them contact each other and meet in an online game!įebruary 2010 a function was ready for playing live hnefatafl online, soon with rating and chat functions. Other than that there was practically no direct contact with other players from this site.ĬlustrMap, however, showed visitors and users of the applet as a dense swarm of dots covering a large part of the globe. Once in a while during the previous years a mail had arrived from a user somewhere with a wish for some or other extension of the online game, and there was the Ashton discussion 2007. Ashton published the thesis "Linnaeus's Game of Tablut and its Relationship to the Ancient Viking Game Hnefatafl", published August 2010 in the journal "The Heroic Age".įebruary 2010. Ashton, Chicago, USA, emailed me some questions about Hnefatafl and Tablut.
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Fully developed it became a Java program of 6400 lines = about 100 A4 pages, and this applet became a stronger opponent than the Swedish had been. January 2002 I decided to write a hnefatafl game from scratch to replace the Swedish one. It is possible still to find the Expo Media Tablut pages in the Internet Archives. Instead they soon after removed the online game from the internet entirely. I emailed Expo Media about it and was told that the developer had left the company, but they would try to fix the errors.
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For some time it worked only in Netscape, then stopped there, too. Initial work was done parallel to studies."ĭuring 2001 the Expo Media online game gradually stopped working because of changes in Java and in the browsers available. I developed application about Vikings, East India Company, Leonardo da Vinci as well as the game Tablut. Expo Media developed multimedia for exhibitions, cd-rom and kiosks. Snip from Edström's Curriculum Vitae: "Expo Media NS AB, Graphic Designer 1993-1995. One page told the story of the great 1993 viking exhibition and the game hnefatafl, the game rules (Skalk), and ended up with sending the reader off to the Swedish company Expo Media's online hnefatafl game, a "Skalk Hnefatafl 9x9" written in Java: The hnefatafl game was everywhere to find in this exhibition with many viking graves and the viking always bringing to the other side his personal set of hnefatafl pieces. An interesting and exotic game to get to know, but it was annoying to lose so easily when playing the defenders' side even against beginners.įebruary 1993 there was a big exhibition at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, "Viking and White Christ", with extraordinary contributions from many countries. Games in the Iron Age", authored by the Danish archaeologist Karsten Kjer Michaelsen.īy these rules the king is captured from 2 sides and wins in corner. The rules were those we at this site call "Skalk Hnefatafl 11x11", published earlier the same year by the Danish archaeological magazine Skalk in the book "Board and Piece.
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Note that the king was open to capture from about turn 12, but presumably due to an oversight on both players' part, the capture was neither made nor averted at that time.December 1992 I met the Viking game Hnefatafl for the first time, in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. The play on the king's side was very defensive, with some retreating moves made early on when there were more agressive alternatives available. The fourth move shows a windmill-like construction which you can see by playing out just the attackers' first four moves from the move list. The match shows the gradual construction of a blockade, which is complete a few turns from the end of the game. David is a regular at hnefatafl tournaments, while the tournament was Dorothy's first time playing hnefatafl. In this first round match David Lonsdale took the part of the attackers, and Dorothy Vinegrad played the king and defenders. Vinegrad | Hnefatafl: the Game of the Vikings Hnefatafl: the Game of the Vikings