Tablut and its varieties

Tablut is a game where each player has a different objective and amount of pieces on the board thus making it an asymmetry type. The goal of the white pieces on the board is to have their King reach one of the marked pieces on the edge or the corner of the board. The black pieces need to defend these squares and also try and have one of their pieces surrounding the king on each side to win the game. both players are able to take a piece from the other by having the opponents piece surrounded adjacently on both sides. Every piece is able to move as many squares as they like in a straight line (not diagonally and similar to a rook in chess) as long as their path isn't blocked by any other piece. 

Now we have the rules and objectives of the game out the way lets talk about the varieties. The image above shows Tablut which we can see has a 9x9 grid with 8 whites and 16 black (all varieties stick with the 2:1 White:Black ratio).

 

Tawl Bwrdd has an 11x11 grid with 12 White and 24 Black.

As we can see from the image to the right their are more ways to take pieces from the beginning and is considered to be more complicated than Tablut due to the increase in the information that the player has to take in and put towards their strategy.

Finally we have Alea Evengelli which has 18x18 with 24 White and 48 Black. This is the game that was played in the documentary Games Britannia. Some people consider this to be too large a version of the game and can take a long time to reach the outcome.

In my lecture we all got the opportunity to play Tablut for ourselves. We quickly introduced a house rule the white piece having to win by getting to the corner instead of the sides as the game is far too unbalanced otherwise. I found that although I assumed it would be simple, you did have to take your time and think ahead with your moves. I also found as the black pieces that I found it difficult to surround the king on all sides.