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Tablut rules

The Sami game recorded by Carl Linnaeus in Lapland in 1732, read the way most modern players read it, with the gaps in his notes named as gaps.

Updated

The game in short

Nine squares by nine. Sixteen attackers around the rim against eight defenders and a king on the central square. The attackers move first. The defenders win by walking the king onto the edge of the board; the attackers win by taking him.

Because the goal is the whole rim rather than four corners, tablut is fast. The attackers cannot cover everything, and a defender who breaks the ring cleanly usually wins on the spot.

Setting up

Files run a to i, ranks 1 to 9. The central square, e5, is the konakis — the tablut name for the throne. The corner squares a1, i1, a9 and i9 are plain board.

Sixteen attackers stand as four groups of four: three abreast at the middle of each edge, with a fourth man stepped in behind them.

  • South: d1, e1, f1, with e2 behind.
  • North: d9, e9, f9, with e8 behind.
  • West: a4, a5, a6, with b5 behind.
  • East: i4, i5, i6, with h5 behind.

Eight defenders stand in a cross around the king on the konakis at e5: e3, e4; c5, d5, f5, g5; e6, e7.

Movement

All pieces slide along a rank or a file, any number of empty squares, and stop on an empty square. Nothing moves diagonally and nothing jumps.

Only the king may end a move on the konakis. Once he has stepped off it, other pieces may slide across it but may not stop on it. The corners are ordinary squares and anybody may occupy them.

Capture

Capture is custodial and active. Move a piece so that an enemy soldier is trapped between it and another of your pieces along a rank or a file, and that soldier is removed. Stepping into an existing gap between two enemies is safe, because the capturing player has to build the trap by moving. One move may capture on several sides at once.

The empty konakis is hostile and acts as one half of a capture for either side. While the king sits on it, it is hostile to the attackers only. The corners do nothing.

The king is armed and captures like an ordinary defender.

Winning

The defenders win when the king reaches any square on the outside edge of the board: rank 1, rank 9, the a-file or the i-file. He does not have to reach a corner, and a corner is worth no more than any other edge square.

The attackers win by capturing the king, and how they do that depends on where he is standing. This is the one place where tablut is openly asymmetric, and it is deliberate: it protects the king while he is bottled up in the middle, and exposes him the moment he runs.

On the konakis
The attackers must hold all four squares next to it.
On a square next to the konakis
The attackers must hold the other three squares around him; the empty konakis itself counts as the fourth side.
Anywhere else
He is taken by an ordinary custodial capture between two attackers, exactly like one of his own men.

A side with no legal move at the start of its turn loses. There is no shieldwall, no edge fort and no encirclement in tablut.

Repetition and the move limit

  • The side about to bring about the same position for the third time must vary, and loses if it does not.
  • A hundred moves without progress draws the game.

Sources

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

  • Carl Linnaeus, Lapland journal, 1732

    The only eyewitness account of a tafl game in play. It settles the board, the sixteen attackers and eight defenders, and the general shape of the game; the escape squares, the plain corners and the exact conditions for capturing the king are the modern settlement stated on this page.