In the simplest design type, each piece's top ends in a sharpened “pyramid” which for the women has a notch cut into it.

[4][7][5] In some variants, several pieces are allowed to occupy the same sárggis (short line), while in other rule sets this is unclear or explicitly forbidden.

Each side's army is led by a queen (dronnet), which the players place on the rightmost X-marked sárggis on the middle row.

The rules were also documented during the 1970s by the Sámi author Oahpt'ii Hánsa (Hans A. Guttorm) who had learnt the game from his father.

The North Sámi word "sáhkku", which is the name of both the game and the throw "X", means "fine", as in "mulct" or "penalty".

One theory, put forth by Edmund Johansen, a veteran player of the game, to the French researcher Alan Borvo, is that "fine" in this case is a euphemism for "offering", used to avoid the wrath of Christian priests and evangelists.

According to Johansen's theory, it was in fact correct that the "King" piece had earlier been seen by players as representing a non-Christian deity in the game, and that the men's and women's "recruiting" of it implicitly happens through offerings.

[17] ...this king may perfectly well have meant god with the signification the Sámit give to that word, i.e. a natural power, neither good nor bad, with whom one has to deal anyway by making offerings.

You may know the Sámit often give things new names just to avoid the minister’s wrath, so they could say penalty while they really thought of offering.”[18]In support of this theory, Borvo has noted similarities between some wood-constructed Sámi sieidis (objects that are sacrificed to) and the shapes given to certain sáhkku king pieces.

[3][20] The word Sáhkku is not related to the vaguely similar names of chess that derive from Old Persian (such as the German Schach, from which the Finnish shakki and the Hungarian sakk were borrowed).

Sáhkku is part of a family of running-fight games that has its oldest traceable roots in the Eastern Mediterranean, and has been played at least since the 1300s.

[23] 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).

[21] The game daldøs, played in parts of Denmark and southern Norway, is an obvious relative of sáhkku and tâb.

[27] It is generally assumed that tâb, daldøs and sáhkku have not developed separately, but are related to one another, and that the game has its origin in the Middle East.

[21] The ‘’Varangian track’’ favored by Depaulis posits that Vikings who travelled in Eastern and Southeastern Europe between the 800s and 1000s may have learnt a game of the tâb family in Byzantium, brought it home, and that daldøs and sáhkku developed out of this.

Depaulis notes that objections to this theory include that there is no evidence that the tâb type of games existed in the Middle East at such an early point in history, and that the east-faring Vikings were mainly from contemporary Sweden, whereas daldøs and sáhkku are generally known to have been played only within the contemporary borders of Norway and Denmark - the confirmed exceptions to the latter being localities in Finland and Russia that were immediate neighbors to the Coast Sámi of Norway.

Sáhkku was generally played on the North Coast of Sápmi, the areas where the Sámi were most involved in the Pomor trade, and which were targeted by Kven immigration.

[19] Depaulis additionally doubts the Kven and Pomor tracks because he finds it hard to imagine that the Norwegians and Danes based their daldøs game on the Sámi sáhkku game, but he does not give any arguments as to why this is any less likely than the opposite; nor does he address the possibility that daldøs and sáhkku could have developed separately, but with roots in the same Middle Eastern progenitor.

Borvo notes that the absence of sáhkku and daldøs traditions on the long stretch of coastline between Jæren in the south and Ivguvuotna in the north does not speak in favor of this theory, or indeed any theory presupposing that tâb-type games were at one point played along the entire western coast of Scandinavia.

[19] Finally, Depaulis points to a speculative opposite direction of this game family's spread – the ‘’Vandal track’’, in which a three-rowed running-fight game was brought from the North to Northern Africa by Vandals in the period 400-500 CE, and spread from there to the Middle East.

It also implies that sáhkku and its northern relatives may be direct descendants of the original North European running-fight game.

In addition to the sparse written sources, a key difficulty is that the tâb types of game were generally made from “ephemeral” materials which do not leave long-lasting material remains: often wood in the North,[30] and in the Middle East the game has often simply been drawn in the sand, using twigs and stones for pieces and dice.

[23] As regards sáhkku, this lack of material artifacts problem was made worse by Nazi Germany's burning of Finnmark and North Troms in 1944–45.

Operation Nordlicht targeted the region with scorched earth tactics, and destroyed the pre-World War II material culture of the Coast Sámi almost in its entirety.

The game is, however, also known to have been played in northern parts of Finnish Lapland, more precisely Ohcejohka and Aanar, and among the Skolt Sámi of contemporary Norway, Finland and Russia.

In some localities the game was still played regularly during the 1960s (often in secrecy to avoid negative reactions from those with religious objections to it) but it eventually fell out of widespread usage.

[36] Sámi cultural revitalization began to pick up speed during the 1970s and 1980s, and in this period some copies of old sáhkku game sets were made.

[38][15] In the period around the change of the millennium, researchers began to take an interest in sáhkku and its history, leading to several articles published about the subject in English and French.

Since then, several small internet-based actors have begun to offer sáhkku sets for sale, but the game is still not widely available on the market.

During 2018, there have been several sáhkku playing events in Sápmi and southern Norway, among others an open cup held by Sámi organizations in Oslo.