Buga-shadara

Lore & Background

The board of Buga-shadara consists of an Alquerque board flanked on two opposite sides by square patterned boards called 'side-houses'. This design makes it a tiger hunt game, but unlike most such games which have triangle-like expansions, Buga-shadara's side-houses are square. The two deer are initially placed on the two central points of the Alquerque board (the intersection of the diagonals), while the dogs are initially placed on the 24 points of the board excluding the deer's starting positions.

Reader's Guide

Buga-shadara is significant as a variant of the tiger hunt game family, unique for its square side-houses and the number of dog pieces (24). The game begins with the deer player moving and capturing from the start, while the dog player must first drop the remaining 16 dogs onto vacant points before moving any. The deer capture by short leaps as in draughts, and the dogs win by blocking the deer's movement. With perfect play, White wins in 40 to 50 moves. The game shares similarities with Rimau-rimau Version B, but differs in board design, number of pieces, and opening procedures.

Did You Know?

• The word 'shadara' resembles 'shahdara', which can be translated as 'the way of kings'.
• A variant allows White to move one piece immediately after dropping a piece in the beginning portion of the game.
• The deer are represented by two black pieces, and the dogs by 24 white pieces.
• The board is an Alquerque board flanked on two opposite sides by square patterned boards.

Cultural Roots & the Name

Buga-shadara, also called Bouge Shodre, is a two-player abstract strategy board game from Tuva, a republic in Siberia, Russia. It belongs to the hunt-game family, where one player commands a small force of powerful pieces while the other fields a larger pack of hunters. Here, the hunted are deer—the word "buga" in Tuvan—shown as two black pieces, and the hunters are dogs, represented by twenty-four white pieces.

The name "shadara" carries a linguistic thread reaching well beyond Siberia. It closely resembles "shahdara," a term in which "shah" historically denotes the emperors, kings, and lords of Iran, also known as Persia. The full word "shahdara" is thought to mean "the way of kings," with "shah" as king and "dara" as the path. A location called Shahdara Bagh in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, further shows the term's wide geographic footprint. The referenced article on Buga-shadara links the two black pieces, called boars in that source, to the role of kings, hinting that the hunted animals must find a way through the surrounding dogs.

Board Architecture & the Square Extensions

The playing surface of Buga-shadara is built around an Alquerque board. What sets this game apart, however, is the addition of two square-patterned boards attached to two opposite sides of the Alquerque grid. The referenced article calls these extensions "side-houses." Because the core is an Alquerque layout, Buga-shadara is classified as a tiger hunt game, or tiger game. Yet among all tiger games, the square shape of these flanking boards is distinctive; most comparable games use triangular extensions instead. This geometric choice is what makes Buga-shadara unique within the tiger-game family.

The equipment is straightforward: two black pieces stand in for the deer, and twenty-four white pieces represent the dogs. The deer begin on the vertex where the two square extensions meet the Alquerque board, while eight dogs are initially positioned on the eight points surrounding the central square, leaving the very center point empty. The remaining sixteen dogs are dropped onto vacant points during the opening phase of play.

The Hunt: Mechanics & Objectives

The game opens with the deer moving first, while the dogs spend their initial sixteen turns placing the remaining pieces onto any vacant points on the board. Only after all twenty-four dogs are on the board may the white side begin moving them. The deer, by contrast, are free to move and capture from the very first turn.

Movement for both sides is simple: a piece slides along a line segment to an adjacent vacant point, one piece per turn. The critical asymmetry lies in capturing. Only the deer can take dogs, and they do so with a short leap in the style of draughts—the deer must be adjacent to a dog, jump over it, and land on the vacant point directly behind, all in a straight line following the board's pattern. One dog may be captured per turn, and captures are never mandatory.

The dogs' sole winning condition is to block both deer from moving. The deer win by reducing the dog force to roughly ten pieces, at which point the dogs can no longer form an effective encirclement. A noted variant allows White to move one piece immediately after dropping it in the opening phase.

Solved Outcome & Kinship with Other Hunt Games

Analysis of Buga-shadara reveals a decisive theoretical result: with perfect play on both sides, White—the dogs—wins in between forty and fifty moves. This confirms that the numerical advantage of twenty-four pieces over two is sufficient to guarantee an encirclement, provided the dogs execute their blocking strategy flawlessly.

The game's closest relative is Rimau-rimau, particularly its Version B, which shares the same opening arrangement of eight men around the central square with the middle point left vacant. The two games differ in several respects. Rimau-rimau Version B fields twenty-two men rather than twenty-four, and its opening procedures include an extra step: the tigers may remove one man from the board and reposition one of their own tigers onto any vacant point. Buga-shadara has no such additional opening procedure. Furthermore, in Rimau-rimau the tiger is permitted to capture an odd number of enemy pieces in a single turn, a rule with no parallel in Buga-shadara, where only one dog may be taken per leap.

Buga-shadara also sits within a broader family of related hunt games, including Main tapal empat, Bagha-Chal, Aadu puli attam, various fox games, Adugo, Komikan, Kaooa, and Kungser.