How to play Baghchal
Baghchal is the Nepali hunt game for two people. Four tigers start in the corners of a board of twenty five points and try to eat five goats by leaping over them. Twenty goats arrive one per turn and try to leave every tiger with nowhere to move.
- Players
- 2
- What you need
- A board of 25 points, 4 tigers and 20 goats
- How long
- A game takes a few minutes
What the game is
Baghchal is a hunt game, so the two sides are not doing the same thing. One player has four tigers, the other has twenty goats. The tigers are trying to eat five goats. The goats are trying to hem the tigers in until not one of them can move anywhere at all.
The name is two words, bagh for tiger and chal for a move. It is played all over Nepal on a wooden board of twenty five points, and the pieces stand where the lines cross rather than inside the squares.
Nothing is hidden and nothing is rolled. Both players see the whole board all the time, there are no cards and no dice, and every game you lose is a game you could have seen coming.
The board
Twenty five points in five rows of five, joined by sixteen drawn lines: five across, five down, the two long diagonals, and four short diagonals running from the middle of one side to the middle of the next.
The diagonals only touch every other point, and that is what gives the board its shape. Eight lines leave b2. Four leave b3, right next door. Out at the edge there is less of everything, so a corner like a5 has three lines out of it and no more. Room is what a tiger lives on, which is why the middle of the board is where a tiger is safe and a corner is where it dies.
This page names points the way the move log does: columns a to e from the left, rows 1 to 5 from the bottom, so a5 is the top left corner and c3 is the middle. The board itself carries no letters or numbers. They are here only so the text can point at something.
Setting up
- Put one tiger on each of the four corners: a5, e5, a1 and e1. That never varies, and a tiger is never taken off the board for the rest of the game.
- Leave the twenty goats off the board, in a pen at the side. Not one of them starts on a point.
- The goats move first. On that opening turn there are twenty one empty points and the goat player may use any of them.
- The tigers reply straight away. A tiger can eat on its very first move if a goat has been put next to it with an empty point beyond, so there is no grace period to rely on.
Putting the goats down
For the first twenty goat turns you do not move anything. You place. One goat per turn, on any empty point, and that is the only thing the goat player is allowed to do. Goats already on the board are frozen for the whole of this phase.
The tigers are not frozen. They step and they leap from the first turn onwards, so placement is not a quiet setting up period. It is where most of the goats get eaten.
The phase ends the instant the twentieth goat lands, and the log says so: every goat is down, so now they can move. That twentieth placement was a goat turn, which means the tigers move first in the phase that follows. The goat player never gets a free move to tidy up first.
A game can finish before placement is over. The ending is checked after every half move, placements included, so the tigers can reach their fifth goat with goats still waiting in the pen, and a placement that seals the last tiger in wins there and then.
How a tiger eats
A tiger has two kinds of move. It can step one point along a line to an empty point, exactly as a goat does. Or it can leap: two points in one straight direction along one line, over exactly one goat, landing on the empty point directly beyond. The goat it jumped is eaten and carried off to the pile beside the board.
All three points have to be right. There must be a goat in the middle, not an empty point and not another tiger, and the far point must be empty. Get any one of those wrong and there is no leap along that line.
One leap eats one goat and the turn is over. There is no chaining, so however the board is arranged a tiger can never take two goats in a turn. Eating is not compulsory either. A tiger with a leap in front of it is free to step instead, and often should.
That picture is the mistake everybody makes once. Blocking the lines out of a point is half the job. The point beyond each goat has to be filled too, or the goat you built the wall out of is the goat that gets eaten.
Moving the goats
Once the last goat has been placed, a goat turn is one step: pick a goat, slide it along a line to an adjacent empty point. That is the whole of it. Goats never leap, they never eat, and nothing at all removes a tiger from the board.
Room is scarce by design. If nothing has been eaten, exactly one point is empty when placement ends: twenty five points, less four tigers, less twenty goats. Each goat eaten along the way leaves one more point free, so a goat side that has been bitten has more room to shuffle in and fewer goats to do the shuffling.
Most goats therefore have nowhere to go, and a goat turn is usually about feeding one line at a time into whatever gap the tigers are standing beside. A goat that steps out of a wall tends to open a leap behind it. Think before you touch one.
Tigers keep both of their moves in this phase. A tiger with no goat next to it steps like anything else. Tigers also get in each other's way: one tiger cannot step onto a point another tiger holds and cannot leap it either, so two of them can shut each other into a corner with fewer goats than you would expect.
How the game ends
The tigers win by eating five goats. The counter along the top of the screen keeps the tally, Eaten 2/5, and the moment it reaches the target the game stops, even if that same leap happened to leave the tigers with nowhere to move.
The goats win when the tiger side has no legal move at all. All four tigers have to be stuck at the same moment. Trapping three of them wins nothing, and the Tigers trapped counter falls back down as soon as the tigers untangle themselves. It is a reading of the board right now, not a score you are banking.
That test is made at the start of the tigers' turn, which means the trap has to be completed by a goat move. A tiger that walks itself into a blocked position is not a loss: the goats still have to play a half move first, and a careless one can open a line again.
Two endings are left. The first is the mirror of the tiger rule: if the goats have no legal move on their turn, the goats lose. The second is a draw, and it comes in two shapes. The same position with the same side to move for the third time is drawn, and so is reaching four hundred half moves, two hundred each, with nothing settled. The repetition count runs in the movement phase only, and every goat eaten wipes it clean.
Playing it here
One tap does everything. On your placement turn, tap an empty point and a goat goes down there. Once you are moving, tap one of your own pieces to pick it up and then tap the point you want it on. Tapping anywhere else puts it back down. You can also drag a piece straight onto a point, which does the same thing in one gesture.
You cannot drag a goat out of the pen. Placing is done by tapping the point you want, and dragging is only for pieces already on the board. An illegal attempt does nothing and says nothing, so if a tap seems not to have taken, the move was not a legal one.
The board tells you what it will accept. A faint dot on an empty point means you can drop a goat there, a solid disc means the piece in your hand can go there, and a ring round a piece means that is the piece you have picked up. A leap looks exactly like a step. The only clue is that the disc is two points away with a goat in between.
Drag an empty part of the board to turn it, scroll or pinch to zoom, and use the small cluster at the bottom right to turn, zoom and straighten up again. Dragging one of your own pieces moves the piece rather than the view. The in-game menu holds speed, sound, the theme and the language, and nothing that touches the game, so there is no resign, no draw offer and no undo to go looking for.
Things worth knowing
- Goats are placed to build walls, not to be safe. A goat with an empty point behind it is food, so put each one where the point beyond it is already taken or off the edge of the board.
- Tigers die in the corners and along the edges. A tiger on c3 has eight lines out of it. A tiger on a5 has three, and three leaps to go with them. Herd them outwards.
- Playing the tigers, think the other way round. Keep them apart, keep them off the corners, and never eat a goat if the meal costs you the last free point you had.
- Count the point beyond, every single time. That is most of goat defence and a fair bit of goat attack.
- Tigers do not have to eat. Against a goat player who knows the game, the leap that takes a goat is often the leap that walks a tiger into the corner where it dies.
The settings
The game's own page sets the table up before you start. Goats to win is the one that changes a rule. The others decide who plays which side, how hard the bot is, and how fast it all moves.
| Setting | Standard | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Mode | Play | Play seats you on one side with a bot opposite. Watch bots puts a bot on both seats, greys out the side picker, and starts the next game by itself when one finishes. |
| Your side | Goats (move first) | Which side you take. The goats move first whoever is holding them. Random is re-rolled at the start of every game, and otherwise you keep the side you picked from one game to the next. |
| Difficulty | Medium | How far ahead the bot looks and how often it plays a random legal move instead. Easy looks one move ahead and plays at random on 55 turns in 100. Medium looks three ahead and does it on 15. Hard looks five ahead and Perfect seven, and neither of them ever blunders. Nothing on the board changes. |
| Goats to win | 5 | How many goats the tigers must eat to win. Three makes it a tiger's game and seven a goat's. It is the number after the slash in the Eaten counter. |
| Speed | 1× | How fast the pieces move and how long the bot pauses before playing. 2× and 4× change no rule, and the same control sits in the menu, so you can speed a game up halfway through. |
The words
- Baghchal (बाघचाल)
- The game. Bagh is tiger and chal is a move, so the name is roughly the tiger's move.
- Bagh (बाघ)
- Tiger. Four of them, and the side doing the hunting.
- Bakhra (बाख्रा)
- Goat. The side with twenty of them, who moves first.
- Goti (गोटी)
- A piece on the board, tiger or goat alike. The app asks you to pick a goti to move.
- Bindu (बिन्दु)
- A point: the place where lines cross and a piece stands. Not the square between them, which is never used for anything.
- Naghnu (नाघ्नु)
- To leap over. What a tiger does to a goat on the way to the point beyond it.
- Khanu (खानु)
- To eat. This is the word for a capture in both languages, because eating is what the tiger is there for.
- Adkinu (अड्किनु)
- To be stuck. A tiger with no move at all is adkiyo, and the counter at the top of the screen says how many of the four are.
- Barabari (बराबरी)
- A draw. Neither side takes the point, and in a staked online table the pot goes back.
- Khel (खेल)
- One game, from the four corners to the result. The dialog at the end counts them, and the tally carries on until you leave the table.
Every rule on this page is the one the app plays by. Change any of them on the game's own page before you start.