Sixteen Soldiers - Rules, History & Strategy Guide

Sixteen Soldiers is a two-player abstract from Sri Lanka, played across South Asia and hugely popular in Bangladesh under the name sholo guti — "sixteen pieces". In India it is known as cows and leopards. In villages it is often played by scratching the board into the ground and using stones for soldiers.

Henry Parker documented it in Ancient Ceylon (1909) as Hēwākam Keliya, the War Game, noting it was also played in India and Bangladesh as sōlah guttiya, "sixteen balls". Parker records that the pieces are called soldiers and that a captured soldier is said to be "chopped". Its closest relatives are the Sri Lankan games peralikatuma and Kotu Ellima, which use four triangular extensions instead of two and 23 and 24 pieces a side respectively; it is also related to the Indonesian Permainan-Tabal.

The board is an alquerque lattice with a triangular extension on two opposite sides — 37 points in all. Each player has sixteen soldiers and wins by capturing every enemy soldier.

1. Set up: your sixteen soldiers fill your half of the lattice and the triangle nearest you. The lattice’s middle row of five points is left empty.
2. On your turn you use one soldier, and you either move or capture — never both.
3. To move, step a soldier to any vacant adjacent point along a marked line.
4. To capture, leap a soldier over an adjacent enemy into the vacant point directly beyond, in a straight line along the board pattern. The leapt soldier is removed.
5. Captures are not compulsory, and a soldier may keep leaping for as long as leaps are available — you may stop whenever you like.
6. Soldiers move and capture in any direction from the very first move. There is no forward-only restriction and no promotion.

• Because captures are optional, a chain is a choice: stopping short often leaves your soldier safe where finishing would hang it.
• The five empty points in the middle row are the whole opening. Whoever controls that band controls where the first leaps happen.
• Count the reply before you leap. With capture in every direction, the point you land on is as exposed as the one you left.
• The triangle apexes are dead ends — a soldier parked out there has almost no mobility.
• Trade evenly early and look for the double: one well-placed leap that threatens two chains at once usually wins material.

Some regions of South Asia play on a board with four triangles rather than two. Scale the same idea up and you get its Sri Lankan cousins: peralikatuma with 23 soldiers a side and Kotu Ellima with 24, both on four-triangle boards. Strip the triangles away entirely and you are back to plain alquerque, played on the bare 25-point lattice with twelve pieces a side.