Alea Evangelii

No. of Players

Two

Equipment

This game can be played on the vertices of an 18x18 square grid. Forty-eight black counters, twenty-four white counters, and one King counter are also required for play. The game of Go also uses an 18x18 square grid and thus it could be utilized, along with the Go stones, for the play of this game. A specially marked or larger King counter will still need to be improvised, however.

History

Saxon in origin, this game could represent a Sea-battle. It is described in an English manuscript from King Aethelstan’s court (c. CE 925-940), which attempts to give the game scriptural significance as a harmony of the gospels. The manuscript illustrates the initial arrangement of the counters.

Objective

In reconstructions of Tafl games, it is nearly universally accepted that the objective of the "attacker" player, with the larger force, is to capture the king and the objective of the defender is to allow for the king to escape. Even the most definite ideas concerning Tafl games, however, will eventually have some doubt cast on them by a reconstruction. Here, one of the primary questions that arise is: Where does the king escape to? Most reconstructions say that the king has escaped once it has attained any cell at the edge of the board. Sometimes this is stated as escaping "off of the board", but this is just a matter of semantics because a piece that has attained an edge square could not be impeded from further advancement off board. (Unless, of course, the reconstruction being played only allows the king a single orthogonal move per turn, rather than the generally accepted move of the rook in Orthochess. In which case the attacker would have one last chance to capture the king before it escapes off board.) There are, however, many ideas that the king should be made to escape to a corner cell. Evidence for this comes from many existing historical boards which have special markings at the corners. These specially marked squares may also designate a place that a piece may be captured against or be for simple decoration.

Questions may also arise as to how the king is captured. It is generally accepted that the king is captured exactly as other counters are captured, via double custodianship. Also known as sandwiching, this just means that if a counter has two opposing counters on either side of it, so that all three of them are now in an orthogonal line with the odd counter in the center, the central odd counter is then captured and removed from the board for the rest of the game. Again, however, some dissent arises. This dissent, however, may only arise from misinterpretations of Linnaeus' account of Tablut or from misunderstandings by Linnaeus himself. It is easy to find 20th century descriptions (Murray, Bell, et al.) of the Sami Tafl game, Tablut, stating that the king was captured by quadruple custodianship, or being surrounded on all four sides by opposing pieces. It is easy to see, however, that this can make the objective of the attackers very difficult to nearly impossible. It is increasingly common to interpret Tablut rules and Linnaeus' description of them as meaning that a king is captured by quadruple custodianship only when it is still at the central square (throne or "konakis") and also by triple custodianship, being surrounded by three opposing counters where the fourth vacant side is the konakis. Interestingly, this also suggests that a king can not re-enter the throne or konakis once it has left. I would personally suggest using simple double custodianship capture for all pieces in all Tafl games. This not only seems logical, but is also simple.

Play

Unfortunately, no rules of play are given with this game’s only known description.

Strategy

Variations

Sources