The Game Ned Kelly

The basic concept of hnefatafl, a small group trying to escape from the clutches of a larger group, lends itself well to the game being marketed as an 'escape story'; see for instance Magpie and Papillon's Escape. This Australian commercial game centres around the outlaw Ned Kelly, being helped by his gang members in trying to escape from the police at the Siege of Glentowan.

Unlike any other commercial hnefatafl sets I have, The 'Game Ned Kelly' comes in a cardboard tube, study enough to survive the journey from Latvia, where I finally found my cope of the game for a reasonable price (prior to that, I had seen several eBay listings originating from Australia, but the shipping costs were just prohibitive, and customs charges would have come on top of that).

The 11 x 11 board is made of cloth, not unlike the one that came with my very first hnefatafl set, but not as elaborately decorated.

The pieces are made of plastic; 12 bronze-coloured pieces around a bronze-coloured Ned/king, all 'iron-clad', against 24 blue-coloured pieces in the shape of 'police helmets'.

The pieces are quite simple, but they certainly do the job.

The rules for 'The Game Ned Kelly' are pretty much those for traditional hnefatafl (same movement of the pieces, same method of capturing, Ned/king escaping in the 'shamrock' corners), but there is one important difference: when capturing a piece, the capturing side can choose to either remove the captured piece from the board, or leave it on the board and reintroduce one of their own previously-captured pieces on one of the relevant starting squares. I'm not aware of any other game derived from hnefatafl to have this particular rule, which is reminiscent of the drop rule in Shogi (Japanese chess).