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Ratti Chitti Bakri (Red White Goats) This game was documented by Hem Chandra Das Gupta while he was working on some of his own geological field work. The informants as he stated were Pathan or Pashtun who lived in Mianwali district of Punjab. He explained in his essay that the games he documented from the region were played by everyone in the area including both children and elders, and the games were found at times etched on stone slabs in common spaces. Similar looking boards have been commonly found both in incised patterns in various sites across India inside temples and also in other places.
The board of this game has similarities with the games Bis Gutiya and Ram Tir from Bihar. It is a two-player game. According to Das Gupta, there are 81 cross-points and each of the two players is the possessor of 40 pieces, the central point being left vacant. The rules of this game are very similar to the game of Bara Guti. As explained by the informants, this game is played with red and white stones which also relates with the abundance of stones in the region of Mianwali, Punjab in Pakistan. There is a great deal of similarity between this game and the game known as Satul prevalent in Sumatra, the only distinction being that in the Sumatra game, two additional triangles with their apices at A and B are required. Each of these two triangles has six cross-points, so each player has to provide himself with 16 pieces instead of 40 as in case of the Punjab game.
This game travelled to Cape Town in South Africa through East-Indian slave trade under Dutch rule, where it is called Dam Daman and currently Ratti-chitti-bakri is also connected with checkers, roundabouts and draughts, and Surakarta in France. In the Philippines it is known today as damath, as it is used as a teaching tool for maths. The real name of the game is believed to be permainan, which is the Malay word for 'game'.
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Sher Bakar This game was documented by Hem Chandra Das Gupta while he was working on some of his own geological field work. The informants as he stated were Pathan or Pashtun who lived in Mianwali district of Punjab. He explained in his essay that the games he documented from the region were played by everyone in the area including both children and elders, and the games were found at times etched on stone slabs in common spaces. Similar looking boards have been commonly found both in incised patterns in various sites across India inside temples and also in other places.
The game of Bagh Chal has multiple variants all across South Asia. It is a two player hunt game played on an alquerque game board. The kind of alquerque board varies along with the number of tigers and goats as well. Bagh chal is also the national game of Nepal and this game is played either on a board but also at times etched on surface or boards drawn on plain surfaces are used to play this game as for this one.
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Nao Guti This game was documented by Hem Chandra Das Gupta while he was working on some of his own geological field work. The informants as he stated were Pathan or Pashtun who lived in Mianwali district of Punjab. He explained in his essay that the games he documented from the region were played by everyone in the area including both children and elders, and the games were found at times etched on stone slabs in common spaces. Similar looking boards have been commonly found both in incised patterns in various sites across India inside temples and also in other places. Nao Guti as the name suggests are played with nine pieces each and it is a two player game. Das Gupta draws comparison of this game with two other games that were documented in Eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) in Bikrampur. They are known as bara-guti pait-pait, and tin-guti-pait-pait. The rules of the game are the same, but the diagrams used are different, though the difference between the patterns of the board used for nao-guti and baraguti-pait-pait is slightly different, that for the latter being only a little more elaborate and consistent with the increase in the number of pieces required for the game.
This type of alquerque board is also commonly found in other countries besides India, for example Achi from Africa, Triodi from Greece and many more. While the variant differs along with the number of pieces used by per player in the game but the structure of the board has its similarities.
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Tre Guti This game was documented by Hem Chandra Das Gupta while he was working on some of his own geological field work. The informants as he stated were Pathan or Pashtun who lived in Mianwali district of Punjab. He explained in his essay that the games he documented from the region were played by everyone in the area including both children and elders, and the games were found at times etched on stone slabs in common spaces. Tre Guti is also one of these games. Tre Guti is a capturing game played on a small board as the image shows.
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Do Guti This game was documented by Hem Chandra Das Gupta while he was working on some of his own geological field work. The informants as he stated were Pathan or Pashtun who lived in Mianwali district of Punjab. He explained in his essay that the games he documented from the region were played by everyone in the area including both children and elders, and the games were found at times etched on stone slabs in common spaces. Do Guti is one of them. It is a two player game and as the name suggests Do Guti, means two pieces and it is played as such. Do Guti is a blockade game from Punjab in Pakistan. Graffiti on early monuments suggest this game could be medieval in date.
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Sat Gol Game This game was recorded by Hem Chandra Das Gupta and the information was collected during one of his field visits to Gosalpur in the district of Jubulpur, in present Madhya Pradesh. According to Das Gupta concentric circles with three diameters are required for playing the game. It is a two player game played with four stones each kept in one circle. This game according to other sources, is similar to other variants of Mancala but the unique factor that it carries is the structure of the board. Elsewhere the board consists of a rectangular format with circles drawn on each side or played on a wooden board with holes made onto them, making it a two player game but here it is conformed into a circle hence giving it the name, Sat-Gol. Das Gupta further states in his essay that a careful study of this game shows the similarities with the Khasi game of Mawkarkatya, and a few other games allied to it. This game however, appears to be an extremely primitive form of the game prevalent in the Assam hills, Orissa and other places.
Murray misunderstood Das Gupta's description, writing that "the player captures the contents of the hole beyond, or if there is a sequence of empty holes, the contents of the first loaded hole". Das Gupta, however, stated: "[The move] continues until the player drops his last piece within a circle next to which there is an empty one and then he will be in possession of the pieces lying within the circle immediately next to the latter".
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Kaooa This game was recorded by Hem Chandra Das Gupta and the information was collected during one of his field visits to Gosalpur in the district of Jabalpur, in present Madhya Pradesh. According to Das Gupta this is a peculiar type of tiger play and as the image shows, seven kaooas (crows) and one tiger are necessary for the game. Two players are required for the game; the player with the kaooas tries to checkmate the tiger, while the player with the tiger attempts at capturing all the kaooas by jumping over them according to the ordinary rules of the tiger play. This type of tiger-play is rather interesting, and differs from the type of tiger-play prevalent in Bengal and Orissa in which the number of goats or ballets may be 24, 20, 12 or 3, while the number of tiger may be 1,2 or 4.
Kaooa is a hunt game documented in the early twentieth century in India, but it is probably much older, as graffiti with the pattern of the board have been found at sites such as medieval Vijayanagara. This board also looks like a star and can also be played in the star game.
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Gol-Ekuish This game was recorded by Hem Chandra Das Gupta and the information was collected during one of his field visits to Gosalpur in the district of Jubulpur, in present Madhya Pradesh. As shown in the image seven concentric circles with three diameters are required for playing this game, the diameters meeting the circles at 42 points. It is a two player game, and each of them provides himself with 21 pieces which are placed at the 21 cross-points arranged along 3 consecutive radii.
Charu Chandra Das Gupta in his essay where he documented the games from Bihar, he noted some similarities of Gol-Ekuish and Pretwa or Pretoa along with Bara Guti. According to him, the difference is that in Gol-Ekuish, The board is of seven circles which is divided into six parts by a diameter of three and in case of Pretwa/Pretoa, the board consists of three circles divided into six parts by a diameter of three. At times even pretwa is played by twelve pieces or bara-guti, just the difference being that there are four circles instead of three in case of Bara-Guti.
