Ancient Board Game: Hnefatafl

This is the game of of Scandinavia, the ancient civilization of Odin. Jokes aside, the game presented a very broken gameplay, as one side would always win. It involves white pieces (gathered in the center), and black pieces (scattered on the edge) on an 11 by 11 square board. The goal is to escort the king of white pieces to reach the edge of the board. Now, this is broken due to several things, one being the "pieces elimination" method is highly unfair; where it takes two pieces to eliminate one opposing piece, but it takes 4 pieces, to eliminate the king. Another one would be the fact that the "finish line" for the king is any square on any edge. And the last one being the movement of the pieces are similar to the movement of the Rook in the game of Chess. Due to this imbalance, people needed to modify the rules for the game to make it a balanced game, and that trouble was the (assumed to be) birth of the modern day Chess.

I personally liked the Nordic history and Scandinavians, so there is no limit on how biased I am to this game. Yes it is broken, but to me, it felt very powerful to be able to play the game of this great origin. Also, the game pictured a war scenario where a king is surrounded by enemies and he was on the quest to escape the fate of death, or being captured.