The History of Tablut
The best-documented member of the entire Tafl family, thanks to one 18th-century naturalist's notebook.
Linnaeus in Lapland
In 1732, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus - decades before he revolutionized biology with his system for naming species - travelled through Lapland cataloguing plants, animals, and the customs of the Sami people he met along the way. Among his notes, he recorded a board game the Sami called Tablut: its 9x9 board, its pieces, and the rules by which they played.
That description turned out to be enormously important. Almost no complete rulebook for any Tafl game survived from the Viking Age itself - the game had simply fallen out of use across most of Europe by the time anyone thought to write its rules down. Linnaeus's notes on Tablut, though recorded centuries after Tafl's Viking-Age heyday and imperfect in places (his manuscript is ambiguous about a couple of edge cases, which is exactly why different reconstructions and modern rule sets still disagree on some details today), remain the single most important primary source scholars have used ever since to reconstruct how the whole Tafl family was likely played.
The Best-Known Tafl Variant
Partly because of that documentation, Tablut is the best-known and most historically significant member of the Tafl family - the one most often used as the baseline when reconstructing the rules for its many relatives, from the small 7x7 Brandub up to the enormous 19x19 Alea Evangelii.
PaperGames also has the smaller 7x7 Brandub variant, if you'd like to compare the two board sizes.
This Version
PaperGames plays Tablut on the standard 9x9 board with 8 attackers, 8 defenders and a king, using a clearly-defined modern king-capture rule (see the rules page) - since, as Linnaeus's own notes illustrate, even the best-documented Tafl source leaves some details open to interpretation.