The Tigers and Goats Game

You may have been sitting at a booth in a diner just off of a freeway one day for lunch when you saw a peg board puzzle, a game made of a small block of wood and golf tees. There is a triangular outline drawn on the face of the wood with holes spread out. The object is to jump over the pegs into an empty hole, which removes the jumped peg, and leave as few pegs standing as possible. In Nepal there is a very popular 2-player game that is similar to that concept with a sense of danger and carnage called "bagha chal" in Nepali or "Tiger Moving". The playing board is a board overlaid with a brass sheet and a playing field etched out with 25 positions to stand on. The playing pieces are 20 goats and 4 tigers. It has Tibetan origins and it's how Sherpa porters and students in Kathmandu pass the time.

In this game the tigers can leap to the empty space over a goat and eat it, but if the goats position themselves well leaving no extra empty space the tigers can't move. The goats win if they can trap all the tigers like that, but the tigers win once they eat at least 5 goats. The game actually starts with a tiger at each of the four corners of the board, and they can make one move each turn. Alternatively, the the other player places one goat at a time on the board, and once all of them are placed the goats can start to shift their positions. The game is offensive for the tigers and defensive for the goats, and it can be played quickly for fun, or with subtlety and technique by experts. It lends itself to a colorful imagination a bit more than hopping golf tees.