Traditional Nepali Games: Bagh Chal and Langur Burja, Explained and Playable

Bagh Chal (बाघचाल) means the tiger's move, from bagh, tiger, and chal, move. It is played on a square grid of five points by five points, 25 points in all, with lines joining them horizontally, vertically and along the alternating diagonals that give the board its distinctive star pattern. Pieces sit on the intersections, not in the squares, and travel along the lines.

The two sides are not mirror images of each other, which is what makes the game interesting. One player has four tigers, placed on the four corners before play starts. The other has twenty goats, none of them on the board at the beginning. The goat player spends the first twenty turns feeding goats onto the board one at a time while the tigers are already moving and already hunting. Tigers capture by jumping a goat in a straight line to the empty point beyond, exactly as in draughts. Tigers win the moment they have taken five goats. Goats win if they can reach a position where not one of the four tigers has a legal move left.

That asymmetry produces two completely different playing experiences from one small board. The tiger player is looking for tactics: forks, sacrifices tempted into the open, a goat left one point too far forward. The goat player is doing something closer to engineering, building a solid front that advances a point at a time and never leaves a gap behind it. Beginners almost always find the goats harder, and almost always lose with them, because the correct goat move is frequently the one that looks passive.

The board belongs to the alquerque family, a very widely distributed pattern that also underlies Solah Guti in Nepal and India and several southern Indian hunt games. Similar tigers-and-goats games are played across South and Southeast Asia. The Nepali version, with its four tigers, twenty goats and five-capture threshold, is the one that became a national emblem, and you will find sets sold in brass and in painted wood in every tourist shop in Kathmandu.

In Thankot it is not a tourist object. It is played on shop steps and on boards scratched into the dirt, with bottle tops and pebbles for pieces, which is how the overwhelming majority of games in Nepal have always been played. The full Bagh Chal rules page sets out both phases, the capture mechanics and the strategy for each side in detail.

Langur Burja (लङ्गुर बुर्जा) is a betting dice game. Six six-sided dice are used, and instead of pips each face carries one of six symbols: jhanda the flag, burja the crown, and the four playing card suits, itta diamond, pan heart, hukum spade and chidi club. A cloth printed with the same six symbols is spread on the ground. Punters put money on whichever symbols they fancy, the banker shakes the dice in a cup and tips them out, and payment depends on how many of the six dice landed on your symbol.

The name is a puzzle worth explaining. Langur is the grey monkey, and burja is the crown or bastion. The usual explanation is that the shaking cup was traditionally made in the shape of a monkey's head, and that older boards carried a langur on the face where modern sets print a flag. The game is the same one played as Jhandi Munda across the Indian border and, with three dice instead of six, as Crown and Anchor in the British Navy since at least the eighteenth century.

Its season is the autumn. During Dashain and Tihar, gambling that is otherwise discouraged is widely tolerated, and Langur Burja cloths appear at the edge of every festival ground, outside temples, at bus stops and in courtyards. If you walk through Thankot during the Dashain fortnight or on the nights of Tihar you will hear the dice before you see the board.

It is worth being blunt about what the game is. Langur Burja is gambling, and under the payout rule used on the street the banker holds an edge of roughly 13.9 percent on every stake. That is not a small edge. The Langur Burja rules page works through the exact probabilities so you can see where the edge comes from, and the version playable here uses counters that cannot be bought, sold or cashed out.

A board game of perfect information and a dice game of pure chance look like opposites, and in game-theory terms they are. What they share is the social setting. Both are games you play in public, in a group, with onlookers commenting. Neither needs equipment you cannot improvise. Neither has a governing body, a rulebook or a tournament circuit in Nepal, which means both have local variations that people will insist are the real rules.

They also mark out the year between them. Bagh Chal is an everyday game, played at any season by two people with time to spare. Langur Burja is a festival game, tied tightly to the six weeks or so that run from Dashain through Tihar and on to the Mahalaxmi Jatra in Thankot. Learning to recognise the two of them is a quick way into how the year here is actually structured.

Learn Bagh Chal. It rewards effort, it can be taught to a child in three minutes, and it stays interesting for years; computer analysis by Lim and Nievergelt showed that with perfect play from both sides the game is a draw, which is exactly the balance point you want in an abstract game. Start as the tigers, because tiger play is more immediately satisfying, then switch to the goats once you can see the forks coming.

Langur Burja takes about thirty seconds to learn and has no skill component at all. Play it here to see what a fairground round feels like and to watch the probabilities behave over a few hundred rolls, which is genuinely instructive, then stop.

These are on the list rather than on the site. We would rather say so than dress up four empty cards as coming soon.

• Solah Guti (सोह्र गुटी): Sixteen pieces a side on an alquerque board, captured by short leaps.
• Dandi Biyo (डण्डी बियो): The stick and peg game of the hills, played on open ground.
• Gatta (गट्टा): Five stones, thrown and caught through progressively harder rounds.
• Chungi (चुङ्गी): A rubber band ball kept in the air with the feet. Counted, not scored.