page_title: Sáhkku
section_title: African and Asian relatives
hierarchical_section_title: Sáhkku / History / Related games / African and Asian relatives
caption_attribution_description: English: Tâb board game.
context_page_description: Sáhkku is a board game of the Sami people. The game is traditional among the North Sámi, Skolt Sámi, Inari Sámi and Lule Sámi but may also have been played in other parts of Sápmi.
context_section_description: Tâb (also known as ‘’deleb’’ or ‘’sîg’’) is a game played in northern Africa and south-western Asia. A very similar game, tablan, is traditional to India. When compared to sáhkku, tâb has somewhat different rules for moving pieces, and uses sticks in place of dice. The board is often larger, using four rows instead of three, although variants played with three rows also occur in Northern Africa. Pieces can be stacked and moved together, on the risk that all but one of them are lost if the stack is placed on a point where one of the pieces have been before. There is no king or kings’ children present in the game – that feature is exclusive to sáhkku.
  The first description of a game which is certain to be tâb occurred in 1694, that is some decades after Schefferus' book Lapponia described the use of sáhkku dice in Sápmi (see below). However,  a game assumed to be a predecessor of tâb was mentioned in a poem already in 1310. The researcher Thierry Depaulis argues that the game was played “by the 10th century at least”.
caption: Tâb board from Thomas Hyde's book Mandragorias seu Historia shahiludii (1694)
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