Smalltalk Ninja Board Games All the boards

Bagh-chal

Nepal — bagh-chal, the moving of the tigers.

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

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

The goat player's turn is putting 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 closing that last gap is the whole of the goats' endgame.
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 are these?

Bagh-chal on the standard five by five board, four tigers against twenty goats.

Bagh-chal sits close enough to adugo that a one-line summary of the two reads almost the same. What separates them is four hunters instead of one, a board that starts nearly empty, and no den.

Three rules worth knowing before your first game.

One goat at a time: A tiger's jump takes one goat and the turn ends. There is no chain, unlike draughts or adugo.
Capture is not compulsory: A tiger may decline a jump, which matters more than it sounds: 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 that has already occurred. Without it a tiger can shuffle for ever while the goats cannot close the last gap.

One honest limit on that last rule: this board remembers the last twelve positions rather than the whole game. That catches the short shuffles the rule exists for. A position recreated forty moves later is not caught, and is not what the rule is about.

The rules here follow en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagh-chal.