Live data from Hacker News

1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound

lifeinnorway.net

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: 1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound

#4
post #2

We changed the URL from https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/05/1700-yea... to one that is almost identical but has more information. Is archaeologynewsnetwork a blogspam site? Or was this a case of both articles working off some press release?

I honestly don't know. I just posted the one I encountered. But after some googling, this seems to be the original source: https://www.uib.no/en/culturalhistory/135652/gaming-roman-ir...

Re: 1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound

#10
Don't know what drove them to say it is an early form of Hnefatafl, other than that both are games played on a board. Hnefatafl games (there are several [1]) are pure strategy open information games using different pieces with different moves. This discovery is of a game played with dice and apparently identical pieces. There are no pictures of the board. so I can only speculate about it, but my guess would be this game is probably a race game, perhaps a distant relative of backgammon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games

Post reply on HN