Adugo

Brazil, the Bororo. It's also called jogo da onça, the jaguar game.

Who moves first?

The two sides in this game aren't the same, so choosing who moves first also chooses who plays which side.

You don't need an account or an email, and there's nothing to install. You'll get a link to send to the person 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. There are 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 do we use?

We play adugo the way most published descriptions have it, on a board of thirty-one points.

Adugo has no committee and no rulebook, and no date or document to go by. The sources that describe it disagree, so below we say which version of each rule we use.

The sources disagree in three places.

Five dogs, not six: The jaguar wins at five. One source says six, and that's the number you're most likely to have heard before.
Capture is not compulsory: The jaguar may turn down a jump. If jumps were forced, the dogs could lure the jaguar into traps, and no source describes that strategy.
The dogs may move backwards: Several sets adapted for schools only let them move forward. None of the sources on the traditional game do that.

The den has no rules of its own either. It looks as if it should, but its points work like any others. It's just a corner where the jaguar is easy to trap.

We follow most of the published descriptions, including en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adugo.