Recently, a friend set me a challenge to do something a little different. He challenged me to get creative and make something with my hands instead of my normal writing. The challenge was to design and make a Tafl game.

Tafl?

Tafl games are an old style of strategy game involving a segmented board (like a chess board), a king piece and pawns of two different colours. There a quite a few variations of Tafl games but they all have one central theme: there are two sides, one protects the king the other tries to capture it.

I had played a few games of the Brandubh version against my friend. He had hand carved his board from an old piece of leather and made the pieces from dowel cuttings…

As you can see, a very impressive piece of work, so I used this as my own guide. The design is simple, the board is 7×7, there are five central squares in the middle representing the king’s tower and the four corner squares are the escape points. Your aim, if you have the king is to get to an escape square.

The spirit of handmade

The point of Brandubh Tafl is to be very portable, or easy to reproduce. So the challenge was to make a game that could be tossed into a small bag, box or can and be carried around with the other pieces of life. I had some old material and thread sitting around so decided to make it cloth.

The most interesting thing about the Tafl board is that there are no rules on embellishments, symbols or signs. If you feel inclined, you can fill in the entire board with intricate little personalisations and no-one is going to get cranky at you, because it’s your board.

I found the flow of creation meant I had to accept my mistakes, so I could learn from them. Even the casual observer would notice that my mistakes were plentiful and my learning process slow.

My brief foray into the world of handmade, gave me a deeper appreciation for the many people who do this sort of work with their hands. I began to understand the pleasure of seeing the work take shape and the satisfaction of learning how to improve.

Sewing the board

I did learn, the different pattern of stitching on the hem is far more ‘expressive’ than the tighter stitches in the board.

I felt like the creative process was similar to writing. If you have a clear structure from the outset, you can operate within that structure. The level of tangental creativity that you can include on the material is restricted by space. If you stitch or write without operating within a self imposed structure, you end up with a non-descript blob or an incomprehensible bowl of word spaghetti.

Recycling the pieces

What I really enjoy about Tafl is there are only two rules about piece design, you need two colours, and one larger piece to represent the king. That’s it. I’m guessing it was one of the reasons the game was so popular in the early middle ages, all you need are a few stones and a 7×7 board drawn in the sand, dirt or snow. You can make your pieces as ornate or as simple as you want, there is no pressure to carve things such as….

As a wine…enthusiast, I had quite a few old corks just sitting around my house. Most were about the same size, so suited the task. Cork is also a very porous material, so will take paint quite well without needing to prime.

There were some nice feels using old cork. The same feels that I get when I mush two old pieces of soap together to make one uber soap. You are working with something that already exists and building on that. Language operates in the same way. Writer’s will rifle through the vocabulary drawers to find the most accurate or appealing word for an audience, they will recycle paragraphs from one story to insert into another, or write spin off tales that build larger worlds around older concepts.

The end

I found that the pleasure of creation existed not just in the expression of my idea, but also the completion of that expression. I found that my creation was reliant on setting a structure and then operating within that structure. It could be a loose structure, which allowed for an abundance of expression, but structure brings with it the pleasure of fullfillment and the drive to use the tools that were available.

So now, I have something that gives me immense satisfaction and I’m happy to play.