The Viking Game
Spent an enjoyable evening yesterday playing the Viking Game with Jen and family (yes yours truly really knows how to live it up of an evening). It’s a Tafl game or basically one where the teams are not equal. The King (who has a small guard of pieces) has to escape and the attacking team have to prevent the king escaping and ideally surround him with four pieces in order to run him through.
Thinking ahead is actually harder than something like draughts, because the pieces are not constrained to only move once square at a time, they can move any distance as long as their path is not blocked.
I haven’t found a computer equivalent that reproduces the board game we played exactly - only one that runs in a DOS box where the king can win by reaching the edge of the board, which makes it fairly easy for him compared to the version we had where he has to escape to one of the four corners (which are more easily blocked). I suspect this is balancing on the part of the producers of the boxed version because it does seem a bit easier to be the king at least going from the first couple of plays. Also that old DOS game seems a wee bit hard… 
If anyone knows of a more recent Linux variant of this game, do please let me know.
Rowan :: May.29.2007 :: Games, Personal Entries :: No Comments »