hist-games: alea evangelii

[Jane & Mark Waks]

Damian Walker wrote:
> Quoting Jane & Mark Waks's message of Saturday:
>> We play it occasionally in the local SCA. I'm not especially good at 
>> it myself (being a fairly weak strategist), but my friend who *is* 
>> good at it has observed that it's mostly a matter of patient strategy 
>> for the attacker to win, gradually boxing the defender in and not 
>> worrying too much about captures.
> 
> What rules do you play by?  This is one of those variants where no two 
> people seem to agree on the rules, apart from those who just implement 
> Murray's rules.

Good question. As far as I can tell, the game was popularized in the SCA 
by Baron Sallamallah (Jeff DeLuca), through his book "Medieval Games". 
The description there is terse, basically saying that it's a large form 
of tablut -- which more or less follows Murray's lead. So while I'm not 
sure of the origin of the reconstruction (the book is a nice primer, but 
doesn't have bibliography or footnotes), it probably started from Murray.

(Of course, within the SCA there's a fair amount of disagreement about 
the correct ruleset for this family of games. So there's a good deal of 
experimentation, even here...)

				-- Justin