5 Opening Moves That Win More Hnefatafl Games
The opening decides what kind of game you get
Hnefatafl games are won and lost on one question: does the king find an open lane to a corner before the attackers close the net? Everything you do in the first ten moves should serve your side of that question. The attackers move first, and they start with twice the material — 24 pieces against 12 defenders and the king — but material alone doesn’t win a race. (In fact, our simulation data shows the defenders winning the large majority of decided games — 96.5–99.4% between random players and 72.3–98.8% between engine players, depending on variant — so the attackers, especially, cannot afford an aimless opening. The full numbers are in our win-rate analysis.)
Here are five opening ideas — two for each side and one for both — that beat flailing around. Everything below follows the standard rules we use: rook-style moves, capture by flanking, king to a corner.
1. Defenders: open a lane before you need it
The king starts on the throne, walled in by his own men. He can’t move at all until someone steps aside — so the defenders’ first job is plumbing: open lanes along the king’s rank and file so that, when the moment comes, he can leave the centre in one long move instead of three short ones.
Do this early and do it sideways. Slide the defenders sitting on the king’s rank and file off those lines — the outer cross defenders can step off the line to a neighbouring rank (the four defenders directly beside the king start completely boxed in until someone steps aside) — and clear the exits in more than one direction. A king with two open lanes forces the attackers to guard two corners at once; a king with none is just a spectator on the throne.
The caution: don’t clear a lane by pushing a defender right next to an attacker with a hostile square or an enemy piece behind it — that’s a free flanking capture. Remember that moving into a sandwich is safe, but ending your move where the opponent can close one is not.
2. Defenders: the king is the goal, not the workhorse
A tempting beginner plan: get the king out immediately and start running. It usually loses. An early, unsupported king walk gives the attackers a single target while their net is still fully intact — every attacker move both chases the king and builds the blockade.
Instead, spend the opening on the support pieces. Develop defenders toward the quadrant you intend to break through, threaten captures that force attacker responses, and keep the king centrally flexible — one move away from committing to either of two corners. The king should leave the centre when a lane is open and defended, not before. He’s the piece you’re trying to deliver, not the delivery vehicle.
3. Attackers: seal the corner approaches first
The attackers’ instinct is to charge the centre. Resist it. The king wins at the corners, so the corners are where the game actually is — and each one can be sealed with a small number of well-placed pieces. A diagonal wedge of three attackers in front of a corner blocks every path onto the two edge lanes leading into it: the king can no longer end a move on that corner square at all.
These squares are reachable directly from the starting position — each wedge square is one legal move away for an edge attacker — so corner work can begin on move one. You won’t have time to seal all four corners before the defenders react, and you don’t need to: sealing two adjacent corners cuts the king’s realistic targets in half and lets you concentrate the rest of your material on the remaining side of the board.
4. Attackers: keep the ring connected
The attackers start arranged in a loose ring, and the ring is the win condition in embryo: the king escapes by finding a gap, so your opening should never create one. Before each move, ask what the move does to the perimeter. Advancing a piece that leaves an open file behind it hands the defenders exactly the lane idea #1 is trying to build.
Practical habits: advance the ring in layers rather than sending lone pieces deep; keep pieces mutually supporting so defenders can’t pick off a strand of the net with flanking captures; and shrink the ring evenly, tightening toward the quadrant the king leans toward. A connected ring two squares smaller is worth more than a captured defender and a hole.
5. Both sides: tempo beats captures
The single most transferable habit: stop counting pieces and start counting moves. Hnefatafl has no material victory — captures only matter insofar as they serve the race. A capture that costs you a move while the opponent makes progress on the actual goal is frequently a losing trade.
For defenders, this means declining captures that pull your pieces away from the escape lane. For attackers — the side that our engine data suggests has the harder job — it means never trading a tempo for a defender unless the capture also tightens the net. Both sides should ask the same question every move: after this, who is closer to the corner? One more thing tempo buys you: since our rules have no stalemate draw — a side with no legal moves loses — a cramped opponent is a beaten opponent.
Practice against the computer
Openings only become instincts through repetition. Play against the computer and try one idea at a time — a corner wedge as attackers, a two-lane setup as defenders — and watch how the game changes shape. If you’re still deciding which side suits you, our comparison with chess explains why the two chairs feel like different games entirely.