Sholo Gutiसोह्र गुटी

The board

The middle of the board is the Bagh-Chal board: 25 points in five rows of five, joined across and down, with diagonals through every other point. A triangle stands on the middle of each end. Its point is the middle of the square's end row, and it has three points across its middle and three along its base. That makes 37 points.

Pieces stand on the points and travel only along the drawn lines. The lines carry straight on from the square into the triangles, so a piece can step or jump from one into the other.

Setting up

Each side has sixteen pieces. They fill the six points of the triangle nearest you and the ten points of the two square rows in front of it. The middle row of the square is the only empty row.

The first player, at the bottom of the board, makes the first move.

Moving

On your turn, move one of your pieces one point along a line to the next point, if it is empty. Pieces move in any direction, forwards, sideways or back, from the very first move.

You must move. If you have no move at all on your turn, you lose.

Taking

If an enemy piece stands next to one of yours on a line, and the point straight beyond it on that line is empty, you may jump over it to that point. The enemy piece is taken off the board.

• A jump goes in a straight line. It cannot turn a corner, jump two pieces, or jump your own piece.
• After a take, if the same piece can take again from where it landed, it may, and it can keep going. The whole run of takes is one turn. No other piece may move during it.
• Taking is your choice. You never have to take, and in the middle of a run you may stop whenever you like.

Some tables play with forced takes instead. You can choose that before the game: then you must take whenever you can, and a run must go on until no take is left.

How the game ends

• You win when you have taken every one of the other side's sixteen pieces.
• You also win if the other side has pieces left but no move on its turn.
• The game is a draw if the same position, with the same side to move, comes up for the third time.
• It is also a draw after 80 turns in a row (40 each) with no piece taken. Every take starts that count again.

The screen shows how many pieces each side has left and how many it has taken.

Where these rules come from

Sholo Guti is played on boards drawn in the dirt from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh and Nepal, and tables differ. This one follows the most widely written rules:

• The 37-point board, sixteen pieces each and moves in any direction: Wikipedia's Sixteen soldiers article (after Henry Parker's 1909 account from Sri Lanka) and the Sholo Guti Champ app.
• Taking is optional, and a piece may go on taking and stop whenever its player likes: Wikipedia, after Parker.
• Several takes in one turn: also the Sholo Guti 16 Bead Offline app.
• Forced takes are offered as an option because the Sholo Guti Champ app plays that way. That app also lets the other side remove a piece that missed a take. Here, forced simply means a take cannot be skipped.
• Losing when you have no move: the Sholo Guti 16 Bead Offline app. The sources do not say who starts, so the first player does.
• The draws after three repeats or 80 quiet turns are this table's own rules, so that a game between two careful players always ends.

Forced takes

Choose forced takes before the game and a take must be made whenever one is open, and a run must be followed to its end. Then you can offer a piece as bait, and the game turns into forcing the other side's takes rather than avoiding them.