Brandubh rules

The game in short

Seven squares by seven. Eight attackers around the rim against four defenders and their king in the middle. The attackers move first. The defenders win by getting the king to a corner; the attackers win by taking him.

Brandubh is the fastest game in the family. With only thirteen pieces on forty-nine squares, lines open at once, and a single loose move usually settles the result. Treat it as a tactics trainer.

Setting up

Files a to g, ranks 1 to 7. The throne is d4 and the corners are a1, g1, a7 and g7.

Eight attackers stand in pairs at the middle of each edge, each pair running inwards from the rim.

• South: d1 and d2.
• North: d7 and d6.
• West: a4 and b4.
• East: g4 and f4.

Four defenders stand on the arms of the cross around the king, who begins on the throne at d4: d3, c4, e4 and d5.

Movement

Every piece slides along a rank or a file over empty squares, any distance, and stops on an empty square. There are no diagonal moves and nothing jumps.

Only the king may end a move on the throne or in a corner. Other pieces may slide across the throne once he has left it, but may not stop there, and may never stop in a corner.

Capture

Custodial and active. Move a piece so that an enemy is trapped between it and another of your pieces along a rank or a file, and the enemy comes off. Moving into a gap between two enemies of your own accord is safe. One move may capture on more than one side, which happens often on a board this crowded.

Each empty corner is hostile to both sides, and so is the throne while it is empty. While the king is on the throne, that square is hostile to the attackers only.

The king is armed. With only four men to help him, using him as a capturing piece is not optional.

Winning

• The defenders win if the king reaches any of the four corners: a1, g1, a7 or g7.
• The attackers win if they capture the king. On this board he is captured custodially, between two attackers, exactly like an ordinary man — and an empty corner or the empty throne may serve as one of the two brackets.
• A side with no legal move at the start of its turn loses.

There is no shieldwall, no edge fort and no encirclement in brandubh.

Repetition and the move limit

• A player about to repeat the same position for the third time must vary, and loses if they do not.
• A hundred moves without progress draws the game, though a brandubh game almost never lasts that long.

Sources

Everything on this page is written from scratch. These are the works it leans on, and what each one settles.

• The Irish poem naming brandubh

  The medieval Irish verse describing a board of seven times seven with five men at its heart. It settles the board and the number of defending pieces, and nothing else; movement, capture, corner escape and the two-piece king capture are the modern settlement used here.

• H. J. R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess, 1952

  Murray gathered the Irish evidence for brandubh alongside the rest of the tafl material and is the reference point from which the modern reconstructions of this game were argued out.