Walk through an old temple in Tamil Nadu and look down. On a worn stone floor or the step of a mandapa you may find a small triangle scratched into the rock, fanned by four lines and crossed by three. It is a game board, and people have been sitting around boards like it for generations, moving seeds and pebbles, playing tigers against goats.
This is a short guide to that game and its relatives: what it is called, how the boards differ, and what stays the same.
A hunt game
Aadu Puli Attam belongs to a family that game historians call hunt games: two-player games in which a small number of strong pieces try to capture a large number of weak ones, while the weak pieces try to surround and immobilise the strong. The family is found across the world. Europe has fox and geese; South Asia has a whole set of tiger games, played on different boards, with different counts of tigers and goats, but always with the same shape of conflict.
What makes the tiger games distinctive is the capture by jumping and the total asymmetry of the sides. The tigers can kill; the goats never can. The goats win only by making the board so full that the tigers have nowhere to go.
One game, many names
The names describe the pieces, in the language of whoever is playing.
- Aadu Puli Attam (ஆடு புலி ஆட்டம்), Tamil: literally the goat-tiger game.
- Puli Meka and Puli Joodam, Telugu: tiger and goat, or the tiger game.
- Huli Gatta and Aadu Huli, Kannada: the tiger board, or goat and tiger.
- Bagh-chal, Nepali: the tiger's move.
In English you will see it as "tigers and goats", "goats and tigers" or "lambs and tigers". They are all the same idea, though the boards and counts vary by region, which is the next section.
The 23-point board
The southern board that Three Tigers uses has 23 points, and the shape is easy to draw once you have seen it.
Start with a single point at the top, the apex. Four straight lines fan down from it to four points on a base line. Three horizontal rows cross the fan on the way down, each extended one point past the outer sloping lines on both sides, and two short vertical lines join those outer ends. Count the intersections: the apex, three rows of six, and four on the base. Twenty-three.
That geometry gives the game its character. Every point except the apex is on exactly two lines, so a goat only ever has two directions to worry about. Seven points, the six outer corners and the apex, sit at the end of all their lines and can never be jumped. And the apex, with four lines meeting on it, is the only point that connects to four others, which is why a tiger stuck there at the end of the game is such a familiar sight.
Three tigers begin on the board, one on the apex and two on the middle of the top row. Fifteen goats enter one at a time. That is the layout you will find on a temple floor and the one on our How to play page.
Bagh-chal, the Nepali cousin
Nepal's Bagh-chal is the best known of the tiger games outside South Asia, and it is played on a completely different board: a square grid of five by five points, joined by horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, twenty-five points in all. Four tigers start in the four corners. Twenty goats enter one per turn. The tigers win by capturing five goats; the goats win by immobilising all four tigers.
Play both and the resemblance is obvious. The placement phase, the jump capture, the way the goats build walls from safe edges inward and the way the tigers hunt for double threats are all the same skills. The differences are in the details: the square board has more points and more directions, so Bagh-chal games are longer and the goats have more to lose; the triangular board is tighter, and a single careless goat matters more.
If you already play Bagh-chal, you will be a competent goat player at Aadu Puli Attam in an afternoon. The reverse is also true.
Boards on the floor
The boards were rarely bought. They were scratched into a stone floor, drawn in the dust with a stick, or chalked on a doorstep, and the pieces were whatever was to hand: tamarind seeds against pebbles, cowrie shells against stones, two colours of dried beans. A game could start anywhere two people had a few minutes, which is how it travelled.
That is also why the rules vary from house to house. Some families play until the tigers have eaten every goat. Some allow a tiger to keep jumping as long as captures are available. Some start with a single tiger and bring the other two onto the board one at a time, mirroring the goats. None of these is wrong; they are simply the local rules, and the first thing to ask when you sit down with someone new is which version they play.
Three Tigers uses the standard set for online matches, so that two strangers always play the same game: five captures, one jump per turn, tigers on the board from the start, with the threefold repetition and fifty-move draw rules. The family variants are all available for offline games in Settings.
The pieces and the board in the app
We drew the board as a temple at night because that is where the game lives in memory for so many people who learned it as children: stone underfoot, oil lamps, the smell of a kolam drawn at the threshold. The piece sets are brass and cowrie, tamarind and river stone, and terracotta, and the capture sounds are a temple bell and a thavil beat. The appearances change nothing about the rules or the geometry. The board on the floor and the board on the phone are the same 23 points.
Frequently asked questions
Is Aadu Puli Attam the same as Bagh-chal? No, but they are close cousins. Bagh-chal is played on a 25-point square grid with four tigers and twenty goats; Aadu Puli Attam on a 23-point triangular board with three tigers and fifteen goats. The rules of movement and capture are the same in spirit.
Which is older? Nobody knows for certain. Hunt games are old across Asia and Europe, and boards drawn on stone are hard to date. Treat any confident claim with caution.
How do you pronounce it? Roughly AH-du PU-li AH-tam. Aadu is goat, puli is tiger, attam is game or play.
Can I play the Telugu or Kannada versions in the app? The board is the same 23-point board in all three traditions; only the names differ. The app is available in English and Tamil, and the variants families use are in Settings.
Where can I learn the rules? The complete rules are on this blog, and the app's tutorial teaches them on the board itself.