Week 5 ~ The inequality game

This is Episode 5/10 of the Hacking 10 games in 10 weeks project.

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Hacking 10 games in 10 weeks

6 min readDec 28, 2017

Did the Vikings play games? Of course they did. Before Chess invaded and monopolised the board game scene in the 12th century, the most popular family of strategy games across Northern Europe was Tafl. Like Chess, tafl games simulate a conflict between two armies. However, Tafl games feature only one king, and his army is vastly outnumbered by the enemy. The army with a king strives to escort him to the board’s edges or corners, while the king-less army attempts to capture him.

The Old Norse word tafl literally translates as table-top, which suggests there weren’t many other board games around, if they called this just board (game). When new games (such as Skáktafl, aka Chess) were introduced to the Viking society, they added the word hnefa to tafl. Hnefa means to grasp (in the fist), and Hnefatafl games are indeed about seizing and holding.

We can assume Hnefatafl games were widely known and played during the Viking Age, because they were mentioned in several Viking sagas. But as people stopped playing them (in favour of Chess and other new/exotic games), their rules were forgotten. Until 1732, when a young Swedish scientist on an expedition to Lapland observed a group of Sami play an obscure game. His name was Carl Linnaeus and he was obsessed with cataloguing everything. Mostly nature. So he filled a page of his journal with notes on that game.

The game Linnaeus observed his Sami hosts play was called Tablut. In Sami, tablut means (guess what?) board game.

What is this game really about?

Tablut, like the other hnefatafl games, is a game of war. The Sami, a peaceful nomadic people, were likely introduced to it by the Vikings.

War was central to Viking society, and glorified in their cultural production. Viking armies consisted of a self-styled king and his men (Clements, 2005). Although the kings of Europe later claimed divine rule and sat upon the throne rather than being physically present on the battlefield, it was essential for a Viking chief to be considered an equal in war.

In Tablut, the king (+) starts at the centre of a 9×9 board, surrounded by his white troops, which the Sami called Swedes. The black Muscovites are twice as many.

In the Tablut world, every body behaves according to the same physics: both whites and blacks move and capture in the same way. King included.

All piece can move any number of spaces in a straight line horizontally or vertically (like rooks in Chess).

Like human bodies, pieces cannot occupy the same space as another, nor jump over someone else.

There are no duels (1vs1) in Tablut. In order to capture an enemy, two pieces need to gang up (2vs1) and sandwich it (aka custodial capture). It’s a simulation of killing someone by overwhelming them with numbers. Two soldiers are facing each other, another slips in and stabs one in the back. To capture the king, blacks need to surround it (4vs1).

Movements aside, everything else in Tablut is asymmetrical. It’s a game that revolves around inequality.

What will the hacked game be about?

In Tablut, it is the king’s special status that gives both armies their reason to exist. It is the king that orients everybody’s behaviour. No king, no Tablut as we know it.

What about contemporary societies? In most of them, royals are either non-existent, or they play a ceremonial role but hold very little power. Yet privilege, conflicts and inequalities still exist.

So here’s the first spark of an idea. Let’s remove the king from the board, whilst keeping its physics and inequalities. What would the other pieces do? What would drive their conflicts?

How can I hack Tablut so that it’s about conflicts and inequalities of our times?

Not only privilege and inequality still exist in what we call meritocracy, they are on the rise.

Data from tax records shows that both capital income and earned income have grown for the richest families to the extent that in the America of 2010, like the Gilded Age Europe of 1910, the top 1% owns the same share of income as the bottom 50% and the top 10% own the same share as the bottom 90% (Piketty, 2014). Since the 1970s, real wages for workers have increased little or decreased, while wages for the top 1% have risen 165%.

One could argue that this is the result of natural selection facilitated by free market economy. Meritocracy at work. Yet it is not merit but wealth and privilege that determine your chances to succeed in our so-called meritocracy. The gap in test scores between US children from high and low income families is widening (Duncan, 2011). Education was a major driver of social mobility until the 1970s, but your probability to do better than your parents by completing more years of schooling has sharply decreased since. Today, if you’re born to parents with low income, you’ll likely grow into adults with low incomes. If you’re born to wealthy parents, you’ll likely become high-income adults.

I know too little about inequality to make a game that prescribes a recipe out of it. The next book on my reading list is The Spirit Level (subtitled Why greater equality makes societies stronger) by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Meanwhile, I’ll hack Tablut to present players with increased asymmetry, rather than more balance.

Black will start with 20 Precarious pieces. White instead will have 4 Privileged.

In a king-less game, there will be two behaviour drivers.

The Privileged want to keep their privilege, and prevent the Precarious from moving up the social ladder through automation (replacing precarious workers with robots). 2 Privileged pieces capture a Precarious 1 in the standard sandwiching way. Except they don’t capture it, but turn it into an automated worker. That piece won’t move for the rest of the game.
The Precarious go after the Privileged because they want wealth redistribution. 4 Precarious pieces must surround a Privileged piece in order to capture it. Except they don’t capture it, but convert it into a Precarious.

Precarious win when they turn the last Privileged into one of them (the game is technically lost when the next-to-last Privileged is converted).

Privileged win when the Precarious population goes below 4, at which point they won’t be able to surround Privileged any more.

This is just a start, an abstract one. Before I delve further into research and add more layers of meaning to the game, I’ll playtest these core mechanics and see what comes out.

Thanks for reading so far! Comments, feedback and suggestions make me a very happy chap ;)