Bagh-chal

Nepal. The name bagh-chal means tiger moves.

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

The board has twenty-five points, five by five, joined by lines that include the diagonals.
Four tigers start in the four corners. The twenty goats are not on the board yet.

The two sides

One player has four tigers. The other has twenty goats.
The goats move first, by placing.

Putting the goats down

On their turn, the goat player puts one goat on any empty point.
Until all twenty are down that is the only thing the goat player may do. Goats already on the board cannot be moved.
The tigers move throughout, from the very first turn.

How the tigers hunt

A tiger moves one step along a line to an empty point, or jumps one goat along a line to the empty point directly beyond it.
A jump takes one goat and the turn ends. There is no chain here.
Capture is not compulsory. A tiger may walk past a goat it could have eaten.

Once every goat is placed

The goat player moves one goat one step along a line to an empty point.
Twenty goats and four tigers leave exactly one point empty, and the goats' endgame is all about closing that last gap.
From this point on, no move may return the board to a position it has already been in.

Winning

The tigers win by eating five goats.
The goats win by blocking all four tigers, so that not one of them can move.

Which rules do we use?

We play bagh-chal on the standard five by five board, with four tigers against twenty goats.

Bagh-chal is so close to adugo that a one-line summary of each sounds almost the same. The differences are four hunters instead of one, a board that starts nearly empty, and no den.

Here are three rules to know before your first game.

One goat at a time: A tiger's jump takes one goat and the turn ends. You can't chain jumps as you can in draughts or adugo.
Capture is not compulsory: A tiger may turn down a jump. This matters, because taking a goat opens a hole the goats can use.
No repeating a position: Once every goat is placed, a move may not return the board to a position it has already been in. Without this rule a tiger could move back and forth forever, and the goats could never close the last gap.

There's one limit on that last rule. The board remembers only the last twelve positions, not the whole game. That's enough to stop a tiger moving back and forth. A position that comes back forty moves later isn't caught.

Our rules follow en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagh-chal.