Print and Play in Colour!

Saturday, 24th January 2015

For those regular visitors who haven't noticed the change, there are now print-and-play hnefatafl games available in colour. These are an experiment I started at the end of last year. These attractive looking games will hopefully entice more people into giving hnefatafl a try.

Back in November I published the first colour print-and-play game, Copenhagen Hnefatafl. Copenhagen wasn't yet available as a print-and-play, and I decided to see if I could make an attractive-looking colour version. It took a lot longer than the black-and-white versions would have done, but the results were well worth the effort, and download numbers seem to indicate other people think so too.

For December's effort I adopted a Christmas theme for an adaptation of sea battle tafl. And last week I created a version of York Hnefatafl - the rules published by York Archaeological Trust in the 1980s - with a theme taken from the history of the city. I intend to give future print-and-play games different themes, not necessarily Viking related, to add extra interest to the games.

Two of the first three colour games have added new rules to the print-and-play range. But given the popularity of games currently available in black-and-white, like Tablut, Brandub and Fetlar Hnefatafl, I intend to replace some of these older print-and-play games with colour versions. The black and white ones will be moved to the archive, where they will still be available for download.

These are still slow for me to design and make, but as my experience with using Inkscape for this kind of work increases, I'll be able to speed up the process. I hope you enjoy the games, and would welcome any comments. And if you print any of these up I'd love to see photographs of them in play!