The game behind this project
Baghchal, also written Bagh Chal or बाघचाल, is a game of pursuit played on a network of 25 points. One player controls four tigers, which hunt by jumping over goats. The other controls twenty goats, which cannot capture anything and win instead by leaving every tiger with nowhere to move.
There are no dice and no cards. Every position on the board is the direct result of decisions the two players made, which is why the game rewards study in the way that chess or draughts does.
Where it comes from
Baghchal is a traditional strategy game from Nepal and remains associated with Nepali play and culture. Physical boards may be carved, drawn on paper or stone, or made as decorative sets, and families and communities keep their own memories and house practices around the game.
We are deliberately careful about the rest. You will find pages elsewhere that assign the game a precise age, a named inventor, a royal origin, or a religious meaning. We do not repeat those claims, because we have not found reliable sources that support that level of precision, and inventing heritage detail for a living cultural tradition is not a small thing to get wrong.
Published reporting has also raised the concern that fewer people may learn the physical board game as entertainment habits change. That is part of why this version exists.
The family of games it belongs to
Baghchal is an asymmetric abstract strategy game. The two players begin with different numbers of pieces, different abilities, and different winning conditions — an unusual arrangement, and the reason the game feels different depending on which side you take.
It also belongs to the wider family of hunt games, in which a small number of strong pieces face a large number of weak ones. The board itself is an Alquerque network, a lined pattern of points and diagonals that appears in games across several continents.
Related games
Tiger-and-goat and tiger-and-lamb hunt games appear elsewhere in South Asia. Some use different boards, some use different piece counts, and they are not interchangeable. Aadu Puli Attam is a useful comparison, for instance, but it is a different game rather than a regional spelling of the same one.
When you see two of these games described together, check three things: whether each game is named individually, whether the board shown actually matches the game being described, and whether the piece counts differ. Claims that one game descended from another need historical evidence, and that evidence is often missing.
We set the differences out in full on Baghchal compared with other hunt games, including Fox and Geese and the boards these games share.
Why we built this version
Baghchal is built by Web Dev NC. The aim was a version that is accurate to the rules as they are actually played, pleasant to look at, and available without hunting for a physical board — local two-player games, three computer difficulties, and private rooms you can share with a friend by link.
The rules on this site are checked against the game engine rather than written from memory, and where our app makes a specific choice that traditional play handles differently — the repetition rule is the clearest example — we say so on the rules page instead of presenting our version as the only one.
You can play in your browser, get the Android app, or start with a first game walkthrough.
Independent sources
Two published sources support the limited historical and physical details used on this page:
- AI Strategy Approach Development on Baghchal using AlphaZero, Journal of Science and Technology, 2024. Its abstract describes Baghchal as a traditional Nepali game on a 5 × 5 board and notes boards inscribed on wood or stone in public places.
- Play in Scientific and Mathematical Non-Formal Education: Bagh Chal, a Tigers-and-Goats Game, European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2016. It documents the board, pieces, rules, and use of Bagh Chal as a Nepali game in an educational project.
Neither source establishes a precise invention date or named inventor, so this site does not present those claims as fact.