A friend of mine conducts research on the board games of the indigenous people of South America. One of the games she shared with me is La Yagua or The Jaguar. The board is a square with a single triangular extension. Interestingly, this board is similar to other boards in India. Here, we have a wide variety of boards — with two triangular extensions and with four triangular extensions.
Typically, the boards are used to play a battlefield game with two players, each having an equal number of game pieces. However, the ingenuity of people led them to play multiple games on the same board. Among the games played, is a variation of the popular tiger and goat game.
What is interesting about the tiger and goat games is that they are asymmetric games with fewer tigers and more goats. The tigers try to kill the goats while the goats try to surround the tigers so they cannot move. The essence of the games is to try and herd the tigers into a corner so they can be surrounded and blocked by the goats.
The game — La Yagua — is very similar in concept. This similarity of games across thousands of miles is in itself intriguing. However, my friend has another theory. She believes such board games were ancient methods of teaching children to hunt; children as young as nine would accompany their parents on hunting trips, thus beginning their lives as hunters.
She has, in her research, documented the recollections of an elderly woman and her memories of hunting among the Tehuelches of the far south of Argentine Patagonia. “We’d go out on foot to hunt guanacos (…), we’d all go out hunting; we kids were the ones who scared the guanacos (...)… How did we hunt them? We’d corner them, or all the kids would form a circle around them, we’d form a circle and drive them in… the older ones were the ones who drove them in. The guanacos would be cornered, and we’d act as a corral to keep them from getting through… There were so many of us, and with our shouts and the fences, we’d corral any number of them.(…) … many say… nooo! … how can you hunt… you need lots of dogs, lots of dogs. (in Aguerre, 2000, p. 122).”
I found her theory fascinating; and I compared her material to my own research. I am unsure if these tiger and goat games were created for the purpose of teaching hunting, but, I have noticed the skill required for these games is similar to ancient hunting methods. Qamargah is a Mughal hunting style known as a ring hunt or an encircling hunt. Here soldiers or hunters drive the animals to the centre of a circle. Other traditional hunting styles from India are slightly different, but the idea is often the same: to stalk, to encircle, to compress, and track.
The more I study traditional games, the more I learn about us and the world around us. We may never know the origins of a game, but its essence reveals itself in many ways.