Bagh-Chal rules
Bagh-Chal (बाघचाल) is played by two people with unequal armies. One commands four tigers, the other twenty goats. The rules fit on a postcard; the game does not.
The board
Play happens on the twenty-five intersections of a 5×5 grid, not in the squares. Every point is joined to its neighbours up, down, left and right. Diagonals exist too, but only on alternating points — the two long diagonals of the whole square plus the diamond joining the midpoints of the four sides. This is the Alquerque board, one of the oldest board patterns known.
The practical consequence is that the centre point has eight lines running through it while a point like b5 has only three. Pieces can only travel along a drawn line, so a piece standing on a well-connected point is far more mobile than one on a poor point.
Setting up
The four tigers begin on the four corner points. The goat player starts with all twenty goats in hand, none on the board.
The placement phase
Goats move first. On each of their turns, the goat player places one goat from hand onto any empty point. A goat that is already on the board cannot be moved during this phase — the goat player’s only legal action is to place another goat.
The tigers, meanwhile, move normally from the very first turn. Turns alternate: goat, tiger, goat, tiger. This phase lasts for all twenty placements, and it is where most games are decided.
The movement phase
Once the twentieth goat has been placed, the goat player switches to moving. A goat moves one step along a drawn line to an adjacent empty point. Goats never jump and never capture.
How tigers move and capture
A tiger may take one step along a drawn line to an adjacent empty point — or it may capture. To capture, a tiger jumps a goat: the goat must be on an adjacent point, and the point directly beyond that goat, continuing in the same straight line, must be empty. The tiger lands there and the jumped goat is removed from the game.
Two limits matter. There are no chain jumps — a tiger takes at most one goat per turn. And capturing is never compulsory; a tiger may decline a jump if taking it would walk into a trap.
Winning
- Tigers win by capturing five goats. With twenty goats in the herd that sounds generous, but each loss also tears a hole in the goats’ blocking structure.
- Goats win by immobilising every tiger at once — all four with no step available and no jump available. Trapping three tigers is not enough; the fourth must fall too.
Draws
If the same position occurs three times with the same player to move, the game is drawn by repetition. This site also calls a draw when a hundred half-moves pass with no capture and no placement, since neither side is making progress. Draws are common between strong players.
A note on the stalemated goats
Occasionally the goat player has no legal move at all — every goat is walled in. This site scores that as a win for the tigers, which is the most widely used convention. Some regional variants instead let the goat player pass.