Smalltalk Ninja Board Games All the boards

Adugo

Brazil, the Bororo — jogo da onça, the first game on this site from the Americas.

Who moves first?

The two sides of this game are not the same — whoever moves first also takes the other army.

No account, no email, nothing to install. You get a link to send to whoever you want to play.

How to play

The board

A five by five grid of points joined by lines, with a triangle of six more points attached to one edge.
That triangle is the den. Thirty-one points in all.

The two sides

One player has a single jaguar. The other has fourteen dogs.
The dogs fill the half of the board furthest from the den.
The jaguar moves first.

Moving

Everything moves one step along a line to an empty point next to it.
The dogs may move in any direction, backwards included.

Capturing

Only the jaguar captures. It jumps a dog along a line and lands on the empty point directly beyond it.
After a jump the jaguar may jump again with the same move, but it does not have to. You can stop after any number.
Capture is not compulsory. The jaguar may walk past a dog it could have eaten.

The den

The den is not a special place. Anybody may enter it and no rule treats it differently.
It is simply six points with very few ways out, so a jaguar that wanders in can be shut in there.

Winning

The jaguar wins by eating five dogs.
The dogs win by surrounding the jaguar so that it has no legal move at all.

Which rules are these?

Adugo as most of the published descriptions have it, on a board of thirty-one points.

There is no committee here and no rulebook — no date, no document. The sources that describe adugo disagree, so what follows names which reading each rule takes.

Three places where the sources part company.

Five dogs, not six: The jaguar wins at five. One source says six, and it is the number a player is most likely to arrive already believing.
Capture is not compulsory: The jaguar may decline a jump. Forcing it would be a different game: it lets the dogs bait the jaguar, which is a strategy no source describes.
The dogs may move backwards: Several adapted school sets restrict them to moving forward. None of the sources describing the traditional game does.

The den is not a rule either. It looks like it ought to be one and it behaves like ordinary points — it is a corner that is easy to be trapped in, which is advice rather than a rule.

The reading here follows a majority of the descriptions, among them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adugo.