Many years ago, and in the method to build up something of an inheritance for our children, my wife and I started our first e-commerce store.

We decided to go with traditional, fair trade and handcrafted board games. We want to game server unique, and accessible to people anywhere in the world.

We also wanted, in an age of digital gaming, a form of family entertainment that was not only authentic but educational.

What we loved about those games was that each time we played them we were learning about the culture and custom from which they came.

We were learning history and geography. More than that, we were reminiscing. We were mindful that some family in some hut at the foothills of the Himalayas or some man in a small village in Malawi had lovingly made these games out of their own raw materials and sheer talent.

Bagh Chal was one of those games. We had purchased a handful of these from a small Nepalese business called Sana Hastakala, which was established in 1989 with the financial support of UNICEF in order to start a Fair Trade handicraft enterprise.

In the wake of recent earthquakes, it is especially rewarding to know that local families can be earning a living through Fair Trade industry supported by the western world.

Today, Bagh Chal can be found in universities, schools and fair trade shops all over the world.

We have since sold our own business interest in board games, but we kept the Bagh Chal as a memento for our children.

Photo by David Trounce, 2016 Bagh Chal from Nepal. The Original Tigers and Goats.

History and Overview

Bagh-Chal (Nepali: बाघ चाल bāgh cāl, which translates "Change of Tigers", or "Moving Tigers") originates from Nepal.

Bagh - or 'Bagha' means Riger and chal means, 'to move'.

Bagha Chal is an unusual two player strategy board game. With four Tigers and 20 goats, it is a game of unequal forces and having rules that differ from each other, depending on the side you are on.

The rules are easy to learn but the strategy is almost endless, which is what makes it such a good educational tool for cognitive development in children.

The Tigers, outnumbered, go after the the goats while the goats attempt to block the tigers' movement.

Bagh Chal, considered by many to be the national game of Nepal, was created by Himalayan herders, whose job the game resembles.

Rules of the Game

One player is the tiger (bagh) player with four tiger pieces, and the other is the goat (bakhri) with 20 goat pieces.

The playing board is usually made of stone, wood or polished brass. Like alquerque (an ancestor of draughts or checkers), the game is made up of a grid with 25 points and lines which dictate the movement of both the Tigers and the Goats.

Player movement is along these lines from point to point, but notice there aren't lines between every point, so there are some restrictions on this movement.

The game could be played on a computer screen, on a specially made Bagh Chal board with its game pieces, or even on a piece of notebook paper with the game board pattern scrawled on it and with pennies and nickels for game pieces.

Pieces are positioned at the intersection of the five by five point grid and not inside the areas delimited by them.

According to the most reliable rules, there is a different objective for each of the two players: The tiger must jump ("capture") five goats to win. See Game Play for details on tigers jumping goats.

PHOTO BY DAVID TROUNCE, 2016 Bagh Chal from Nepal. Board Set-up.

In some versions of the game the Tiger player must jump and capture all the goats to win, not just five, but friends and I have found that once you've captured five goats, you've no problem capturing the rest. So the five goats rule probably just came out of an interest in shortening an inevitably lost game. I prefer the five-goat rule.

The goat player must try to make it, so there is no valid move left for any tiger before the tiger eats five of his goats (or all of them, if you prefer the long and tedious version of the game), by using the goats to crowd in on the Tigers and prevent both jumping and regular movement.

This can become particularly difficult if more than a few goats have been captured.

Not everyone can travel to the exotic and wonderful places this world offers us. But what we can do in this day and age, is bring a little bit of that other world into our own homes.

Not only for the benefit of the people whose livelihood depends on Fair Trade Enterprise but also the families like mine that benefit from the education, culture, and rich history of these wonderful games.