The board game makes a great executive desktop trinket that can stimulate creativity, challenge the mind, or rattle the nerves! Lau Kata Kati is a great game for honing one’s strategizing and decision-making skills. If a player cannot perform a move or a capture because its pieces have been blocked or immobilized, the other player wins. If neither player can capture any more pieces, the player with more pieces wins. If a player captures all of their opponent’s pieces, we have a winner. Players alternate their turns using one piece to either move or capture exclusively per turn. Dash-Guti is similar to Lau Kata Kati, but with the addition of two line segments connected to the vertex (one on each side) but exterior to both triangles.Įach player has 9 (or 10) pieces. It is related to Draughts and even more so to Alquerque – pieces are captured by leaping over them. If you ever visit Varanasi and look hard enough, you may find a game of Lau Kata Kati or Dash-Guti etched on a platform at Sheetla Ghat! Lau (or Nau) Kata Kati is a two-player abstract strategy board ‘war’-game native to India. Each counter must pass through all of the other squares on the board and finish at the centre square The counters are moved the numbers of squares determined by a roll of the dice. Each player starts with four counters in the outermost squares marked with a cross. While traditionally played with 4 or 6 cowrie shells, dice can also be used.
There are references of this game in some ancient Indian epics like the Mahabharata (not to be confused with Chausar though!) This game is an example of a “fully observable” system that has an element of chance introduced by the roll of special dice and an element of strategy – the strategy being the counter the player decides to move after the dice are rolled. This is going to be a long one – you’ve been warned!Īshta Chamma or Chowka Bhara – one of the oldest board games extant, still being played in certain parts of India, albeit with different names. Let’s look at nine surprisingly Indian board games. They exist at a level impervious to religion or politics and represent a free means of communication between people that nothing can successfully interrupt – one of the great unifiers of syncretic Indian civilisation. Indian board games are a complex cultural manifestation that takes inspiration from many scientific and artistic disciplines: from mathematics in rules and board design, through painting in decoration to sculpture in pieces or boards.
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