How to Play Tablut

By Jaques of London · Est. 1795 · Updated 2026-08-17

Tablut is a two-player asymmetric strategy game played on a 9x9 grid. One side controls a king and eight defenders; the other controls sixteen attackers. The imbalance is the point: the two sides have different goals, different strengths, and demand completely different thinking.

Players love it for the same reason they love chess problems: there is always a tension between offence and defence, and a single careless move can flip the game. It is typically played on a dedicated board with distinctively coloured pieces, though a grid drawn on paper and coins of two denominations serve perfectly well.

A little history

Tablut belongs to the family of Scandinavian games known as Tafl. The clearest documented record comes from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who observed and recorded the rules of Tablut during his 1732 expedition to Lapland, where Sami people were playing it. His notes, written in Latin, remain the primary historical source. Tafl-type games appear across Norse and early medieval Northern European contexts, but the specific origins of Tablut and how directly modern reconstructions reflect historical play are unclear, since Linnaeus's account has gaps and has been interpreted in several ways by later researchers.

Setting up

1. Place the board so the central square (called the throne or konakis) is equidistant from all four players' edges.
2. Place the king piece on the central throne square.
3. Place the eight defenders on the eight squares immediately surrounding the throne: the four orthogonally adjacent squares and the four diagonally adjacent squares.
4. Place the sixteen attackers in four groups of four, arranged symmetrically around the edges of the board. Each group occupies a cross-shaped cluster centred on the midpoint of each side, specifically the midpoint edge square and the three squares leading inward from it.
5. The attacking side (dark pieces) moves first.

How to play

1. Players alternate turns. The attacker moves first.
2. On your turn you must move exactly one of your pieces. You cannot pass.
3. All pieces move any number of empty squares in a straight horizontal or vertical line, exactly like a rook in chess. No piece may move diagonally.
4. No piece may jump over another piece of either side.
5. The throne square (centre) may not be occupied by any piece other than the king. All other pieces, including the king, may pass through the throne only when it is vacant.
6. Capture is by custodian: you capture an enemy piece by moving so that the enemy piece is sandwiched between two of your pieces on opposite sides along a rank or file. The captured piece is removed from the board.
7. A piece is only captured when an enemy actively completes the sandwich. Moving your own piece into a position where it is already flanked on one side does not result in its capture.
8. The throne square counts as a hostile square for the purpose of captures: a single attacker can capture a defender by trapping it between that attacker and the throne, and vice versa. The same applies to the four edge midpoint squares marked as special on some boards.
9. The king is captured differently from other pieces. When the king is on or adjacent to the throne, all four orthogonal sides of the king must be occupied by attackers simultaneously. When the king has moved away from the throne and its immediate neighbours, the king is captured by surrounding him on all four orthogonal sides, or on three sides if the fourth side is the throne.
10. If a player cannot move on their turn, that player loses immediately.

Winning and scoring

The defender wins by moving the king to any square on the outer edge of the board. The attacker wins by capturing the king before he reaches the edge. A player who has no legal moves on their turn loses immediately, regardless of piece count.

The fine points

The most common dispute concerns the throne's role in captures. The standard ruling, based on the most widely accepted reconstruction of Linnaeus's notes, is that the vacant throne acts as a hostile square for all pieces: either side may use it as one half of a custodian sandwich. Some reconstructions restrict this so the throne only acts as hostile to defenders, but the symmetric ruling is now the most widely taught. Clarify this before play begins.

A second regular dispute is exactly how many attackers are needed to capture the king near the throne. The accepted rule is four attackers when the king is on the throne itself, and four when he is on a square directly adjacent to the throne, with three attackers plus the throne square being sufficient once he has moved one step further away. Edge squares marked as special on some sets are treated as hostile in the same way as the throne for ordinary piece captures, though not for king captures. If your set does not mark edge squares, omit that rule entirely.

How to win more often

• As attacker, move early to control the four central files and ranks. Letting the king reach an open file is almost always fatal.
• As defender, do not rush the king toward the edge in a straight line. Establish a pair of defenders that can escort the king past the midpoint before committing to the run.
• Custodian captures are easy to overlook when you are focused on the king. Count all sandwich threats before moving any piece.
• As attacker, target the defenders first. A lone king is straightforward to surround; a king with two defenders nearby is not.
• Watch for forced moves. If you can create a position where the king threatens two different edge squares simultaneously, your opponent cannot block both.

Variations

Strict Linnaeus Rules

Some players follow only what Linnaeus explicitly wrote, which leaves certain edge cases unresolved and means the throne is not treated as hostile to attackers. This produces a slightly harder game for the attacking side and is recommended only for players who want a historically conservative experience.

Corner-win Variant

In some reconstructed versions, the king must reach one of the four corner squares rather than any edge square to win. This makes the defender's task considerably harder and tends to extend the game. It is common in Hnefatafl sets sold alongside Tablut variants, and is worth trying once both players are comfortable with the standard game.

Larger Tafl Boards

Tablut sits within a wider family of Tafl games played on boards ranging from 7x7 to 19x19. The 11x11 variant, often called Hnefatafl, uses 13 defenders and 24 attackers and requires the king to reach a corner. The core rules of movement and custodian capture remain the same, making Tablut a natural entry point before scaling up.

No-hostility-for-throne Variant

Some sets and clubs rule that the throne square is neutral once the king has left it: neither side may use it as part of a custodian capture. This reduces the tactical weight of the central area in mid-game and tends to make the attacker's task harder. It is a legitimate choice but should be agreed before play starts.

Tablut: frequently asked questions