Fox and Geese - Rules, History & Strategy Guide

Fox and Geese is the best known of the medieval hunt games, descended from the Norse halatafl mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. It spread across Europe by the 15th century — Edward IV of England owned two silver sets — and crossed the Atlantic with settlers, where it became a fireside classic; Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books describe it played on the frontier.

The game is gloriously asymmetric: one fox against a flock of geese on a cross-shaped board of 33 points. The fox kills by leaping; the geese win by smothering. Over the centuries the goose count has ranged from thirteen to seventeen with various movement restrictions, as players tuned the balance between hunter and herd.

One player is the lone fox, the other commands thirteen geese. The fox eats geese by jumping them; the geese, who cannot jump at all, try to crowd the fox into a corner it cannot escape.

1. Set up the cross board: thirteen geese fill one arm and the first row beyond it; the fox starts on the center point.
2. Geese move one step along a line — forward or sideways, never backward.
3. The fox moves one step in any direction, or jumps an adjacent goose to the empty point beyond, capturing it; jumps can chain.
4. The fox wins when too few geese remain to trap it (fewer than six).
5. The geese win by pinning the fox so it has no move left.

• As geese, advance in an unbroken wall: any goose with an empty point behind it is dinner.
• As geese, sacrifice at the edges only; the trap is finished by pressing the fox toward a corner arm.
• As the fox, hunt the flanks: stragglers on the wings create chain-jump opportunities.
• As the fox, never enter a corner arm while the wall is intact — that is exactly where the geese want you.
• Count the herd: below nine geese the wall becomes porous, and below six the geese have mathematically lost.

Variants tune the balance: seventeen geese with sideways-only restrictions, diagonal lines added on some boards, two foxes on larger crosses, and the fortress variant asalto, where soldiers storm a guarded citadel on the same board. The board itself is the same 33-point cross used for peg solitaire — one board, two classic games.