+- Ludii Forum (https://ludii.games/forums)
+-- Forum: Problems (https://ludii.games/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Forum: Game Problems (https://ludii.games/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=17)
+--- Thread: [tablut] capturing against the castle (/showthread.php?tid=217)
[tablut] capturing against the castle - th5555 - 10-26-2020
Hello, and thank you for developing such a wonderful game system! I enjoyed playing some tafl variants, however I noticed a small possible bug.
The tablut rules (Linnaeus version) say:
"A piece may also be captured by trapping it between an enemy piece and the castle."
and
"The king, when in the castle, can only be captured when surrounded on four sides. If it is in a space adjacent to one of the sides, it can be captured when the opponent surrounds it on the remaining three sides."
However the first rule does not work, and instead the rule for capturing the king against the castle (with 3 enemy pieces) is also used for pawns.
By the way, I would really like it if this ruleset (i.e. capture king on 2 sides, king escapes to the edges) was also available for hnefatafl.
RE: [tablut] capturing against the castle - Eric Piette - 10-27-2020
Hi,
Thanks for that reporting. I will have to look these errors more carefully to fix them. I will keep you aware of my fixes.
For the other ruleset, is it just a ruleset you have in mind or do you have a source with that ruleset described?
Regards,
Eric Piette
RE: [tablut] capturing against the castle - th5555 - 10-27-2020
(10-27-2020, 09:41 AM)Eric Piette Wrote: For the other ruleset, is it just a ruleset you have in mind or do you have a source with that ruleset described?Wikipedia has led me to believe that that would be the more faithful recreation of hnefatafl, since the "king on 4 sides" rule is supposedly based on a mistranslation. It would correspond to "Old Hnefatafl 11x11" from this page.
RE: [tablut] capturing against the castle - Walter.Crist - 10-27-2020
The rulesets that we implemented were chosen because they are played in competitions, and are thus rulesets which have some kind of consensus within a group. Of course, we do not know what rules are historically correct for Hnefatafl, or even if the "king on 4 sides" rule was used 1000 years ago (already 700 years before Linnaeus' Tablut account). Even the equation of the Tablut rules with Hnefatafl is itself an inference, and not a foregone conclusion. Even if the two games are related (as seems likely ), it does not mean that all of the rules for Tablut must also have been included in Hnefatafl in the past. Games often have local variants, and change through time, so it's entirely possible that Hnefatafl was played differently in different places, as it was played from Greenland to Sweden and places in between.
It is impossible for us to include every possible ruleset proposed for these games at this stage, so we have to be selective. Most of these kinds of rulesets to be found online are based on what a certain person thinks is fun, but not from much empirical study or data on the history or playability of the games.
In the future, our project will be proposing reconstructions for plausible rulesets based on various metrics and the evidence of what we know for sure about Hnefatafl. Stay tuned to see what we come up with!