An Enemy in Your Midst, and What to Do About It

Saturday, 15th October 2016

A comment on the Capturing the Enemy page has given me an idea for a new blog post this week. What happens when an enemy piece lodges itself safely between two of your own?

Most hnefatafl games allow a piece to move between two others in safety. While being surrounded by two enemies is the way your pieces die, those enemies have to actively position themselves around you for the capture to take effect. A piece lodged between two enemies is a threatening tactic, and can form the basis of a fork attack. A player with an enemy caught between two of her pieces will want to do something about it pretty quickly.

Sometimes this might not be possible or advantageous, though, in which case another solution would be to take advantage of the enemy piece's two open sides: move a third piece to flank the enemy, and then a fourth piece to make the capture. This looks like a four-sided capture, like some games use to capture the king. But really it's just a two-sided capture, where the first two pieces are irrelevant.