Hnefatafl

Hnefatafl is an open source, portable, simple and free implementation of the Norse board game written in the C programming language. The 13x13, 11x11 and Tablut boards are fully supported at the moment of writing this article.

Norse is a very old and quite popular board game that has been played in Scandinavia since 400 A.D.. Using ruleset files, the player will be able to set the game rules. A computer player (AI) is implemented at the moment, as well as both a command-line and graphical user interface (the latter being optional).

Getting started with Hnefatafl

To install and use the Hnefatafl on your GNU/Linux distribution, you must first download the latest stable version from Softoware, save it on a location of your choice, unpack the contents of the archive and open a terminal emulator.

In the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files. Tune the config.mk file for your system, and execute the ‘make’ command in the application’s folder.

Please note, that it is also possible to run the ‘make dynamic’ command for building everything with dynamic linking, as well as the ‘make static’ command for building everything with static linking.

If you want to remove everything that has been installed, type the ‘make uninstall’ command in the app’s dir, using the same ‘config.mk’ file that you used when you've installed the software. If you want to upgrade to newer releases, first uninstall the old version and then install the new one.

Under the hood and availability

As mentioned, the Hnefatafl program is written entirely in the C programming language. It is distributed only as a source tarball (tar.gz file), which helps you install the application on any GNU/Linux operating system, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.

What is new in this release:

• All code related to growable C-strings (used for line reading) has been moved to a separate component called Gleipnir. A possible signed overflow and a problem with focus in some window managers were fixed. All makefiles are now compatible with gmake and pmake.
• Last but not least, the entire program and all data files are now released under the ISC license.

What is new in version 140117:

• `dbl_trap_squares` has been added for piece types, which is a bitmask of squares that can trigger double trap.

What is new in version 140101:

• In case of weird graphical glitches, you can press "l" in XLib to repaint the whole window.
• The program now exits properly when you close the window using a window manager's "close" button (`WM_DELETE_WINDOW`).

What is new in version 131229:

• Another AI optimization by Alexander Dolgunin has been implemented.

What is new in version 131226:

• The AI is twice as fast thanks to an optimization by Alexander Dolgunin.

What is new in version 131221:

• Due to the large amount of changes, this is an unstable version. If there are no bugs, then it's a stable version. https://github.com/soderlund/hnefatafl/blob/master/CHANGES

What is new in version 131214:

• This release fixes a bug and adds a new ruleset.

What is new in version 130920:

• This version fixes a formatting error in the English manual and makes some changes to the makefile.
• There are no code changes, so there is no point in upgrading unless you're really bothered about the manual.