The Board Game at the Heart of Viking Culture
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
See Fetlar Hnefatafl for a modern codification of the (very vague) historical rules:
Thud is a board game based on the earlier dwarfish game of Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl. It is played mainly by Dwarfs and Trolls... The game itself echos the game played by Vikings and Anglo-Saxons "Hnafletafle"- which literally means "Kings Table". Hnafletafle echos go beyond just the name. Like 'Thud' it is unusual in that it is an 'asymmetrical' game...
In that Thud is a parody of it.
Not sure how it renders across machines but it looks ok on my Mac.
I have to say I'm a bit sceptical that this approach can work purely based on win/loss conditions - an attacker victory in particular can often take hundreds of moves in Tafl games.
Not as a general rule. If you're playing as the attacker, you don't always want to take defender pieces even if they're "free" - they're more useful boxing their own king in.
The one I linked looks much worse than your board.
I hope we can continue learning more concrete rules for the ancient version of this game. It would be nice to have its history understood like chess'.
Mr. Jack is another reasonably popular modern one.
The asymmetric tag on Board Game Geek is probably a good place to start. https://boardgamegeek.com/tag/asymmetric/page/1
In more modern times, many RTS games are asymmetrical: think SC2, Dota etc..
If you're thinking about board games, in particular, there's games like Terra Mystica or most miniature games that are designed with a vast number of factions that have differing goals.
Asymmetrical games are in fact hugely popular because they let people roleplay strategies that they may think are more fun
_Spy Party_ is a game in which one player is a sniper and the other player is a spy at a cocktail party pretending to be an NPC.
In _Who's Your Daddy_, one player is a father whose goal is child-proof their surroundings on the fly to thwart the other player, a suicidal baby.
_Evolve_ was a game in which a team of four hunter players hunted a single monster player.
_Natural Selection_ is close to what you describe; one player on each team is playing an RTS and their teammates are playing a FPS. One side is space marines, the other are aliens. Marines have guns, but aliens can move through vents, scuttle up walls, etc.
Most modern territory control games will be somewhat asymmetrical because the territory isn't just abstract squares, hexes or whatever. For example in "London" players control London boroughs, and so this influences the play slightly. That would be at the very mildest end of the spectrum.
On the other end you have things like Star Wars Imperial Assault, where one person is playing the Empire while all other players control Rebels, their objectives are obviously very different (Imperial players generally seek to incapacitate the players or stall them until overwhelming forces become available, Rebels usually want to act quickly and use the element of surprise).
You also have some very non-crunchy games like Zendo. In Zendo one person is a "master" who has chosen some secret rule for what gives configurations of game pieces the "Buddha nature", everybody else makes new configurations and uses a process of asking questions or making guesses to try to figure out what the rule is. Some simple play mechanics keep this structured, but it's not really a competitive game at all.
Also, take any two-player game, and create a new game where the players play the original game twice, switching sides, and you end up with a symmetrical game.
If you play both games in parallel, where each player can choose in which source game to play on each turn, I think you still end up with a symmetrical game (in some sense)
The game, supposedly called in Dwarfish "Hnaflbaflwhiflsnifltafl" (a reference to the Viking game Hnefatafl which it resembles), represents the famous "Battle of Koom Valley" between dwarfs and trolls.
The game was first directly referenced in Going Postal, being played by Vetinari, and became a central concept in the immediate sequel Thud!. (...)
Terry Pratchett devised a fictional history of how Thud was invented similar to the Shahnama theory of the origins of chess. In short, the clever dwarf who invented the game was asked by his king to name his reward. The answer was that he wanted his board filled with gold: One small gold piece on the first square, two pieces on the second, four pieces on the third, etc. Needless to say, this is more than all the gold of the Disc combined. The king then got angry and threatened to kill the dwarf who was 'too drhg'hgin clever by half'. The inventor then hastily changed his reward to 'as much gold as he could carry', whereupon the king agreed and simply broke one of his arms.