Langur Burjaलङ्गुर बुर्जा

The dice and the cloth

The game uses six dice. Every die has the same six faces: a crown (burja), a flag (jhanda) and the four card suits, heart (paan), spade (hukum), diamond (itta) and club (chidi).

The betting cloth shows the six symbols in two rows, as on the printed boards sold in Nepal: club, crown and spade along the top, diamond, flag and heart along the bottom.

The game is named after its two special faces: langur, the old name of the flag face, and burja, the crown.

Placing chips

Everyone places chips at the same time. You may spread them over as many symbols as you like, in whole chips.

• Stake at least 5 chips a round in total, and at most 50 (the table limit).
• If you have fewer than 5 chips left, you stake all of them.
• Once you hand in your bets you cannot change them for that round.
• Bets lie open on the cloth, so everyone can see what the others have put down.

A player with no chips left sits out and watches.

The throw

When every player has bet, the house shakes the six dice under the cup and lifts it. Each die lands on one of the six symbols at random.

How bets are paid

Each symbol you bet on is paid on its own, by how many of the six dice show it:

• No die or one die: you lose the chips on that symbol.
• Two dice: you get your chips back plus twice as many again (10 chips come back as 30).
• Three dice: your chips back plus three times as many (10 become 40).
• Four, five or six dice: your chips back plus four, five or six times as many (10 become 50, 60 or 70).

Example: you put 10 on the crown and 5 on the heart. The dice show three crowns and one heart. The crown pays 40, the heart loses its 5, and you finish the round 25 chips up.

The house

The house starts with 10,000 chips. It collects every losing bet and pays every winning one. If the house ever cannot pay everyone in full, it shares out what it has in proportion to what each player is owed, and the game ends there.

How the game ends

The game ends after the number of rounds chosen at the start (20 unless you pick 10 or 30). It ends sooner if only one player still has chips, or if the house runs out.

The player with the most chips wins. Players level at the top share the win, and if everyone finishes level it is a draw.

Play chips only

Langur Burja is a festival game in Nepal, and played for real stakes it is gambling, which Nepali law forbids. Police make arrests over it every festival season. This table uses play chips only: they cannot be bought, traded or taken away, and they are gone when the game ends.

With the street rule the house keeps, on average, about 14 chips of every 100 staked. That is why the person running a real board always comes out ahead, and it is a good reason to enjoy it only as a game.

Where these rules come from

Langur Burja has no written rulebook, so this table follows what the sources agree on and says where they differ:

• Six dice with the crown, the flag and the four suits: Republica's features on festival games, TechLekh's guide to the Langur Burja app, The Himalayan Times, and police seizures of dice and cloths reported by Ratopati.
• Symbol names: burja, jhanda, paan, itta and chidi appear in every source. The spade is hukum in most of them; one Himalayan Times piece calls it surat.
• The layout of the cloth follows a printed flex board sold by Giftmandu and the board in the NepDroid Langur Burja app.
• The payout is where sources disagree most. TechLekh and the NepDroid app (played by hundreds of thousands of people) say one matching die loses and two or more pay. A Nepali Australian blog from 2011 and a Republica feature copied from it say a single die already wins, as in the British game Crown and Anchor. With six dice the single-die rule would make the house lose steadily, so the street rule is the default here and the single-die rule is an option.
• No source gives a fixed stake or table limit; the 5 to 50 chip limits, the 100 starting chips and the house's 10,000 chips are this table's own choices for a fair game of chips.
• Langur Burja is often compared with Crown and Anchor (Wikipedia), but no source we found shows how it came to Nepal, so this page does not guess.

One die is enough

Some families pay a symbol that shows on just one die: your chips back plus the same again. With six dice this rule favours the players so much that a bet spread over all six symbols can never lose, so it suits a relaxed game with children more than a contest.

Shorter or longer games

Choose 10, 20 or 30 rounds before you start. The game still ends early if only one player has chips left.