Aadu Puli Attam from South India and Bagh-chal from Nepal are built on the same idea. In both, a few tigers hunt a herd of goats that enters one goat at a time, and the goats, which can never capture, win by leaving the tigers nowhere to go. What separates them is the board, the numbers and a handful of rules, and each of those changes the way the game is played.
This guide sets the two games side by side, from the boards and the starting positions to placing the goats and the draws, and ends with two European hunt games on the same theme. The Aadu Puli Attam rules here are the standard rules, exactly as the Three Tigers app plays them, and they are all in the complete rules of Aadu Puli Attam. For Bagh-chal, the guide follows the rules that published descriptions agree on, and says where they differ. For where the games come from and their other names, see the tiger and goat games of South Asia.
The differences at a glance
- The board. Aadu Puli Attam uses a 23-point board of ten lines. Bagh-chal uses a 25-point square grid, five points by five.
- The tigers. Three in Aadu Puli Attam, starting together at the top of the board. Four in Bagh-chal, one on each corner.
- The goats. Fifteen against twenty, all of them in the goat player's hand at the start.
- The safe points. Aadu Puli Attam has seven points where a goat can never be captured. Bagh-chal has four, and a tiger stands on each of them at the start.
- The draws. Aadu Puli Attam has two draw rules. Bagh-chal rule books differ, and some forbid repeating a position at all.
What stays the same
The two games share almost everything else in their standard rules:
- The goats move first, placing one goat per turn on any empty point. No goat moves until the last one is on the board.
- The tigers move or capture from their first turn. A move is one step along a line to an empty neighbouring point.
- A tiger captures by jumping an adjacent goat along a straight line to the empty point directly beyond it. The goat leaves the board for good.
- One capture per turn, and capturing is optional. Tigers never jump tigers, and goats never capture at all.
- The tigers win with five captures. The goats win by trapping every tiger, so that on the tigers' turn none of them can move or capture.
So in both games the goats can lose four and still win. Out of fifteen that leaves eleven to close the trap on three tigers, and out of twenty it leaves sixteen to close it on four.
Two different boards
The Aadu Puli Attam board is a fan. Four sloping lines run from the apex down to the base line, three rows cross them and two short side lines close the edges, making ten lines in all. The apex lies on four lines and every other point on exactly two, so no point has more than four neighbours, and the six corner points have only two.
Bagh-chal is played on the alquerque board: twenty-five points in a square of five by five, joined by horizontal and vertical lines. Diagonal lines run from corner to corner and join the midpoints of neighbouring sides, so they pass through only some of the points. Where two diagonals cross, at the centre and the four points diagonally next to it, a piece has eight neighbours. A point that no diagonal passes through has four at most.
That changes the goats' safety test. In Aadu Puli Attam a goat can be jumped along two lines at most, so the test in our goat strategy guide looks along two. On the five Bagh-chal points where diagonals cross, a goat can be jumped along four.
Where the tigers start
- Aadu Puli Attam: one tiger on the apex and two on the middle points of the top row. The three start on neighbouring points, where they get in each other's way until they spread out, as our tiger strategy guide explains.
- Bagh-chal: one tiger on each of the four corners, so the tigers begin well apart.
The starting points also matter for the goats. A goat can never be captured on a point that sits at the end of every line through it. Aadu Puli Attam has seven such points: the two ends of the top row, of the bottom row and of the base, and the apex. At the start a tiger stands on only one of them, the apex, so the goats have six safe points to build from on their first turn.
Bagh-chal has four such points, the corners, and the game begins with a tiger on each. Until a tiger leaves its corner, there is no point on the board where a goat is safe for good.
Placing the goats
Placement works the same way in both games, but it lasts fifteen goat turns in Aadu Puli Attam and twenty in Bagh-chal.
The first goat shows how much the boards differ. In Aadu Puli Attam it can go straight onto an end of the base line, where nothing can ever capture it, and a careful goat player builds a wall upward from there. In Bagh-chal no such point is free. A published computer analysis of the game found that after any first placement other than the middle point of an edge, the tigers can force a capture within the first ten moves of the game, counting the moves of both sides.
Draws and repetition
The standard rules of Aadu Puli Attam end a stalled game in one of two ways, both counted only once all the goats have entered: the same position, with the same side to move, appearing for the third time, or fifty tiger moves without a capture. Our guide to the draw rules explains both.
Bagh-chal rule books do not agree here. Some add a rule that no move may bring back a position that has already occurred, so a position can never repeat at all. Others do not mention repetition.
A published computer analysis has shown that Bagh-chal is a draw when both sides play perfectly: neither side can force a win.
Two European hunt games
Europe has hunt games of its own, and two of them change the rules that the tiger games share:
- Fox and geese is played on a cross-shaped board of thirty-three points. One fox faces thirteen geese in the oldest form of the game, and more in later ones. The geese start on the board instead of entering one at a time, the fox may jump several geese in one turn, and it wins by taking so many that the rest can no longer trap it.
- Asalto, from nineteenth-century Europe, grew out of fox and geese. On the same cross-shaped board, two officers defend a fortress of nine points against twenty-four rebels, who start on every point outside it. If an officer misses a capture it could have made, the rebel player may remove that officer from the board, and the rebels can win by trapping both officers or by filling the fortress.
Next to these, Aadu Puli Attam and Bagh-chal are close relatives: the weak side enters one piece at a time, capturing is optional and five captures win.
How to practise
The board on our How to play page plays the standard rules of Aadu Puli Attam against a simple opponent, so you can try the Aadu Puli Attam side of each difference in your browser, from the six safe corners to the tigers' start at the top. In the Three Tigers app, online matches always use the standard rules, and the family variants for offline games are in Settings. The app is on the App Store for iPhone with iOS 17 or later.
Frequently asked questions
How is Aadu Puli Attam different from Bagh-chal? It uses a different board and fewer pieces: a 23-point board with three tigers and fifteen goats, where Bagh-chal has a 25-point square grid with four tigers and twenty goats. The capture, the five-capture win and the trap work the same way.
Do the goats move first in both games? Yes. Both games open with a goat placement, and in both no goat moves until the last one is on the board.
Can a tiger capture two goats in one turn? Not in the standard rules of either game. In Aadu Puli Attam, chains of jumps belong to the multiple jumps variant, one of the family variants for offline games in the app's Settings. In fox and geese, the fox may jump several geese in one turn.
Is Bagh-chal a draw with perfect play? Yes. A published computer analysis showed that neither side can force a win when both play perfectly.
Can I play Aadu Puli Attam with a Bagh-chal set? With its pieces, yes: use three of the four tigers and fifteen of the twenty goats. The board is different, so draw the 23-point board yourself, as our guide to drawing your own board shows.