In the Vǫluspá, the great prophecy poem of the Poetic Edda, the seeress describes the gods in the earliest days of the world. They built their halls and forges at Idavöll, worked gold, and played at tafl in the meadow, cheerful and lacking nothing, until three powerful giant maidens arrived and the golden age came to an end. At the close of the poem, after Ragnarök has burned the world and a new green earth rises from the sea, the surviving gods find their golden game pieces lying in the grass where they had left them so long ago.
Norse games today
The games of the Vikings are enjoying a remarkable revival. Hnefatafl has a dedicated modern community, with online platforms, apps, handmade boards and even tournaments. Video games set in the Viking Age have introduced millions of players to Norse culture: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla includes a dice game called orlog, built around Norse gods and symbols, while strategy and survival games such as Northgard and Valheim draw directly on Norse myth.
Norse mythology is also one of the most popular themes in modern casino games. Online slots built around Odin, Thor, Valhalla and longships fill the game libraries of many sites, and players looking for this theme will find Viking-inspired titles at platforms such as Faircrown Casino. If you choose to play, remember that, unlike a game of hnefatafl, slots are pure chance: no strategy can change the result. Set a budget, play for fun only, and keep in mind that gambling is strictly for adults aged 18 and over.
Hnefatafl: the king’s table
The most famous of all Viking games is hnefatafl, often translated as “the king’s table”. Tafl simply means “table” or “board”, and the word covered a whole family of board games played across the Norse world and in the lands the Vikings settled, from Ireland to the Baltic. Hnefatafl itself takes its name from the hnefi, or “fist”, the king piece at the heart of the game.
What makes hnefatafl unusual is that the two sides are not equal. One player controls the king and a small band of defenders, starting in the center of the board. The other controls a larger force of attackers, roughly twice as many pieces, arranged around the edges. The king’s side tries to escape, usually by getting the king to a corner square. The attackers try to capture the king by surrounding him. Ordinary pieces are captured by being trapped between two enemies.
The result is a tense game of breakout and siege that feels very fitting for a culture of raiders, defenders and shifting alliances. In the Orkneyinga saga, Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson boasts in verse of the nine skills he has mastered, and being skilled at tafl comes first on the list, ahead of runes, books, smithing, skiing, shooting, rowing, harp-playing and poetry.
Simple rules to play today
No complete Viking-Age rulebook survives, so modern rules are reconstructions. Much of what we know comes from a related game called tablut, which the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus recorded among the Sámi in 1732. A popular modern version works like this:
- Play on an 11×11 board. The king starts on the central square, surrounded by 12 defenders. The 24 attackers start in groups of six on each edge.
- The attackers move first. All pieces move like a rook in chess: any number of empty squares in a straight line.
- Capture an enemy piece by sandwiching it between two of your own pieces.
- Only the king may stand on the central square or the corner squares.
- The king’s side wins if the king reaches a corner. The attackers win if they surround the king on all four sides.
These rules are easy to learn in a few minutes, but the game rewards real strategy, and players still argue about whether attackers or defenders have the edge.
Game pieces from the graves
Archaeology has given us many traces of these games. Gaming pieces of bone, antler, glass and amber turn up in Viking-Age graves, including richly furnished burials at Birka in Sweden, where warriors were sometimes laid to rest with their boards and pieces. A wooden gaming board found at Ballinderry in Ireland, now in the National Museum of Ireland, is one of the finest surviving examples of a tafl-type board. The famous Lewis chessmen, carved from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and probably made in Norway, show that Norse craftsmen were still producing beautiful gaming pieces well after the Viking Age, and the hoard includes plain disc-shaped pieces for other board games as well as chess.
Dice in the Viking Age
Dice were common too. Viking-Age dice made from bone and antler have been found across Scandinavia and the Norse colonies. Some are the familiar cube shape, while others are elongated rectangular “long dice” that could only land on four faces, a design known from earlier Iron Age Scandinavia.
Dice were used for board games, for straightforward gambling and, in some cases, to settle disputes. Rolling dice put a decision in the hands of fortune rather than any one person, which could make an outcome easier for both sides to accept. That idea, that luck itself could be a fair judge, sits at the heart of one of the most famous gambling stories in Norse literature.
Hnefatafl was not the only board game on the bench. The great Gokstad ship burial in Norway contained a double-sided gaming board, with a tafl grid on one side and a board for nine men’s morris, a game of rows and captures still played today, on the other. Dice-and-board race games similar to backgammon also spread north over time. For long winter nights in a smoky hall, a good game was as valuable as a good story.
Kings who gambled for land
In Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century history of the Norwegian kings, the Saga of St Olaf tells of a meeting between King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway and the king of Sweden. The two rulers disagree about which of them should hold the district of Hísing, near the modern border between Norway and Sweden, and they decide to settle the matter with dice.
The Swedish king throws first and rolls two sixes, the best possible throw, and declares that there is no need for Olaf to bother. Olaf rolls anyway and also throws two sixes. The Swedish king rolls again and throws two sixes once more. Then Olaf throws, and one of his dice splits in two, showing a six and a one on its broken halves, giving him seven and the victory. Hísing passes to Norway.
It is a wonderful story, and almost certainly not a literal record of events. The sagas were written down centuries after the Viking Age, and Snorri was writing about Olaf, a king who had become a saint, so a miraculous dice roll suits the narrative perfectly. But the story shows how natural it seemed to the saga writers that kings might stake land on the throw of a die, and how they read luck as a sign of divine favor.
Games, luck and fate in Norse belief
To understand why games of chance carried such weight, it helps to look at how the Norse thought about luck. Luck was not just a matter of random chance. A person could have good fortune, often called hamingja or gipta, that was almost a personal quality, even a guardian spirit, and could be passed down through a family or shared with followers. A lucky king was one whose people prospered, whose ships returned and whose battles were won.
Above all of this stood the Norns, the three powerful women who sit by the Well of Urðr beneath Yggdrasil and shape the destinies of gods and humans. If the Norns had already woven a person’s fate, then a throw of the dice was not entirely random. It could be seen as a glimpse of what was already decided. Read our pages on the Norns and on Odin, the god who constantly sought hidden knowledge of what fate held, to explore these ideas further.
