Top 10 Traditional Games of Nepal We Grew Up Playing

Before smartphones and online games, entertainment in Nepal often meant a few stones, a wooden stick, an open courtyard and a group of friends. Bagh Chal could be scratched onto a stone floor with chalk and played with pebbles. Dandi Biyo needed little more than two pieces of wood and a hole in the ground. A handful of glass marbles, or a ball tied together from old rubber bands, could keep a group of children busy for an entire afternoon.

This guide looks at ten of Nepal's best-known traditional and childhood games: what they need, how they are actually played, and why they remain culturally interesting even now. A few of these games, like Bagh Chal, have found a second life online. Most of the rest live mainly in memory, in a handful of villages, or in the occasional school sports day. Both are worth understanding.

What Are the Traditional Games of Nepal?

10 Traditional Games of Nepal at a Glance

1. Bagh Chal (बाघचाल) – Tigers and Goats

Bagh Chal, whose name is usually translated as "tiger game" or "moving tigers," is a strategic two-player board game that originated in Nepal. In the Newar language it is called dhun kasa, meaning the same thing. It is played on a 5×5 point grid, with pieces sitting on the intersections rather than inside the squares, similar in shape to the old European game alquerque. One player controls four tigers. The other controls up to twenty goats. That single detail, unequal pieces and completely different goals for each side, is what makes Bagh Chal genuinely unusual among traditional board games, and it's worth understanding before anything else about how it plays.

The game unfolds in two phases. In the placement phase, the goat player enters one goat at a time onto any empty point, while the four tigers, which start on the board's four corners, are already free to move and capture. Once all twenty goats have entered, the movement phase begins and goats can also slide one step at a time along the board's lines. Tigers win by capturing five goats. Goats win by trapping every tiger so that none of them has a legal move or capture left. The same basic version of the game is also found in southern India under a different board layout, though the rules play out the same way, and it remains most popular today in Nepal's rural areas, where a board scratched into stone was often all two children needed.

How Bagh Chal Is Played

Play It Yourself

Try Bagh Chal Yourself

Reading the rules is one thing. See if you can actually trap the tigers. Play Nepal's traditional Bagh Chal directly in your browser: choose to play as either Tigers or Goats, pick a difficulty level, and challenge the Merokalam engine.

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Want the full rulebook plus worked capture examples and beginner mistakes to avoid? Read our complete guide on how to play Bagh Chal.

2. Dandi Biyo (डण्डी बियो)

Dandi Biyo is played with two wooden pieces: a dandi, a stick roughly two feet long, and a biyo, a smaller pointed wooden pin about six inches long. For a long stretch of the twentieth century, especially through the 1980s and 1990s when manufactured toys were scarce in much of Nepal, this was one of the most widely played games among Nepali youth, and it is often described as Nepal's traditional or de facto national game, though it was never actually given that official status. Volleyball was formally declared Nepal's national sport on 23 May 2017.

How to Play Dandi Biyo

In one common version, the biyo is laid across a small hole dug in the ground. The striking player wedges one end of the dandi into the hole and jerks it against the pin to launch it into the air, while other players act as fielders, trying to catch it. If a fielder catches the pin, the turn passes to them. If it lands, the fielders throw the pin back toward the hole; if it goes in, the striker's turn and score are lost, but if it stays out, the striker gets to hit it again, scoring based on how many stick-lengths it travels. Village and family variations differ quite a bit on scoring and setup, so treat any single ruleset, including this one, as a starting point rather than the only correct version. International readers sometimes find it easiest to picture Dandi Biyo as a rough cousin of the Indian game gilli danda, or, more distantly, a stripped-down relative of cricket, with one player batting and the rest fielding.

A Dandi Biyo Association exists as something like a governing body for the game, and an organised event is still held most years around Public Service Day in early September. Even so, without any dedicated government preservation policy and with steadily fewer young players picking it up, several Nepali sources treat the game's long-term survival as genuinely uncertain.

3. Guccha – Nepal's Marble Game

Guccha, also written Guchha or Guchcha depending on the source, is Nepal's take on marbles. Played with small glass marbles on a street, courtyard or patch of packed earth, the basic mechanic is simple: a player flicks a marble with their fingers, aiming to strike an opponent's marble out of the play area or off a target. Variations involving circles, holes or lines scratched into the ground are common, and exactly which version you played usually came down to your neighbourhood rather than any written rulebook. Accuracy, hand control and knowing the terrain of your own street mattered more than any equipment.

Do you remember your favourite Guccha? For a lot of Nepali readers, a particular marble, maybe an unusually large one or an odd colour, was practically a small treasure, traded and protected more carefully than anything that actually cost money.

4. Bhurung – Traditional Spinning Top

In Nepal, the spinning top is known as a bhurung, or sometimes by the more widely used South Asian name lattu. It's a wooden top with a string wound around its body; the player winds the string tightly and releases it with a sharp pull so the top spins on its point. Exact play styles vary by region and generation. In some versions the goal is simply the longest spin, while in others players compete more directly, aiming a spinning top at an opponent's stationary or slowing top to knock it out of a marked circle. As with most of these games, there's no single official rulebook, only whatever version your particular group of friends agreed on.

5. Chungi – Nepal's Foot-Kicking Dexterity Game

Chungi is a traditional dexterity game played by children in Nepal and parts of northeastern India. The Chungi itself is a small, weighted footbag, traditionally made by bundling and tying together a group of rubber bands rather than buying anything specialised. The setup is close to what English speakers would recognise as hacky sack: the goal is to keep the Chungi airborne using your feet, knees and sometimes other permitted parts of the body, depending on the local rules your group used.

Play usually took one of two forms: an individual counting how many consecutive kicks they could manage without letting the Chungi touch the ground, or a small group passing it between each other, with whoever dropped it taking themselves out of the round. It rewarded exactly the kind of quiet, repetitive skill-building that turns into genuine pride once you can string together fifty kicks in a row.

6. Ghutta – Five Stones

Ghutta, also called Gatta, Gotta or Tsibato depending on the region, is Nepal's version of the five-stones game, closely related to what English speakers sometimes call jacks or knucklebones, though played with small stones instead of animal bones. It has traditionally been seen as a girls' game in much of Nepal, though plenty of boys played it too. Play generally starts simply: toss one stone into the air, and while it's airborne, pick up another stone from the ground and catch the tossed stone with the same hand, before things gradually escalate into harder sequences that pick up two, three, then all remaining stones at once.

7. Lukamari – Nepali Hide and Seek

Lukamari is Nepal's version of hide and seek, and needs nothing but an outdoor space and a group willing to run around in it. One player, sometimes called the "dum," covers their eyes at a fixed spot and counts to an agreed number while everyone else scatters and hides. Once the counting ends, the seeker searches the area and calls out names as they find each hidden player. Local rules on what counts as "home base," how long hiding is allowed, and what happens to whoever is found first vary from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, much like hide and seek does everywhere else in the world. What makes it worth a mention here isn't the mechanics, which are internationally familiar, but the specific childhood memory of playing it in a Nepali courtyard, alley or field as the light started to fade.

8. Intu Mintu – Singing Playground Game

Intu Mintu is a group singing game usually played by six or more children, and is often compared to the English game Oranges and Lemons, though that comparison is meant to help explain the shape of the game to unfamiliar readers, not to claim one game copied the other. Two players are chosen as captains, step aside to privately agree on two secret names, then return and form a bridge by holding hands overhead. The rest of the group files underneath while everyone sings a well-known Nepali children's rhyme. When the song ends, the "bridge" comes down around whichever child happens to be passing through at that moment, and that player is quietly asked to choose between the two secret names, which secretly assigns them to one of two teams. Once everyone has passed through and been sorted this way, some versions finish with a tug of war between the two resulting teams.

The rhyme that goes with the game is itself a well-known piece of Nepali children's culture and has since become a popular nursery song in its own right, covered and remixed by children's music channels well beyond the original playground context.

9. Kabaddi

Kabaddi is a contact team sport played between two teams of seven, and it's important to be upfront that it isn't uniquely Nepali. It's one of the traditional games shared across South Asia, also called kapardi in parts of Nepal, and it has a long history in the country specifically, having historically been considered alongside Dandi Biyo as one of Nepal's unofficial national sports before volleyball's formal designation in 2017.

The basic shape of a match: a "raider" from one team crosses into the opposing team's half and tries to tag as many defenders as possible before returning to their own side, all within about thirty seconds and, in the traditional form, all on a single held breath. Tagged defenders are temporarily out of the game. If the raider is tackled and prevented from getting back, the defending team scores instead. As a professional, organised sport, Kabaddi in Nepal has reportedly been in relative decline in recent decades even as it has grown into a major televised sport elsewhere in the region.

10. Kho Kho

Kho Kho is another traditional South Asian team sport rather than something invented in Nepal specifically, tracing back to ancient Indian sporting tradition and ranking as one of the most popular tag-based team games on the subcontinent after Kabaddi. It's played on a rectangular court with a central lane running between two poles. Nine players from the chasing team take the field, with eight of them crouched along the central lane facing alternating directions, while three runners from the opposing team try to move around the court without being touched. Chasers can only run in the direction their crouched position faces until they tag a teammate on the shoulder to switch, a rule that adds a real layer of tactics to what looks, from a distance, like a simple game of tag.

Unlike some of the other games on this list, Kho Kho in Nepal is not simply a memory. The Nepal Kho Kho Association was established in the late 1990s, the sport is contested at the country's National Games, and Nepal's national team finished as runners-up at the inaugural 2025 Kho Kho World Cup, a genuinely current result that shows the game is very much alive.

Other Traditional Games Played in Nepal

A few other names come up often enough to mention, even where documentation is thinner than for the ten games above. Gir is described in a handful of Nepali sources as a field game played mainly on open land after crops are harvested, using a flat round piece cut from an old slipper or a block of wood, struck and driven across the field with a stick in a way loosely comparable to hockey or football, with the aim of getting your piece to the far side first. Because reliable detail on Gir's exact rules and how widely it was played is limited, treat this as a starting point for further research rather than a settled description. Nepal's broader traditional-games landscape also includes locally played versions of tag, hopscotch, knucklebones, a "duck, duck, goose" variant sometimes called Rumaal Chor, and gully cricket, alongside board and tabletop staples like Ludo, snakes and ladders, carrom and chess that, while not uniquely Nepali, have long been part of the same living tradition of homemade, low-cost play.

Why Traditional Games Mattered in Nepal

Almost none of the games on this list required much, or any, purchased equipment. A Bagh Chal board could be scratched into stone with chalk and played with pebbles standing in for tigers and goats. Dandi Biyo needed two shaped pieces of wood. Chungi was built from rubber bands most families already had lying around. Guccha needed a handful of glass marbles that, once owned, lasted for years. This mattered in a very practical sense: courtyards, village paths, school breaks and open fields became play spaces almost by default, and a game could start the moment enough children showed up, with no equipment to buy and often no adult supervision required.

That accessibility also shaped how the games were passed down. Almost none of these came with a printed rulebook. An older sibling, a cousin, or the neighbourhood's more experienced players taught you the local version by simply playing it with you, variations and all, which is exactly why the same game can look and sound a little different depending on which town or even which street you grew up on. Several of these games were also loosely tied to the rhythm of rural and agricultural life: games like Gir were specifically associated with open, harvested fields, while others were seasonal fixtures around festivals and school holidays rather than year-round pastimes. None of this needs romanticising as some simpler, purer past; it's better understood as ordinary ingenuity, using what was on hand, stones, sticks, rubber bands and open ground, to build genuinely engaging games and a lot of shared childhood memory along with them.

From Courtyards to Screens: Are Nepal's Traditional Games Disappearing?

It's a fair question, and the honest answer is mixed. Smartphones and modern entertainment have clearly changed how Nepali children spend unstructured time, and in fast-growing cities there is simply less open courtyard and field space than there used to be, both of which show up repeatedly in Nepali reporting on games like Dandi Biyo. At the same time, it isn't a simple story of total loss. Kho Kho has an active national association and a genuinely current international result to point to. Kabaddi still has organised competition, even if it has become less prominent than in past decades. And digitisation, rather than only replacing these games, has in at least one case helped preserve one of them in a form more children can actually access.

Bagh Chal once needed a board scratched into stone and a handful of pebbles. Today the same basic strategy game can be played on a phone or in a browser, against an opponent who's always available. The platform has changed. The game itself hasn't had to disappear.

Nepal's Board Game, Still Playable

Play the Merokalam Bagh Chal Game

Choose Tigers or Goats, pick a difficulty from Easy to Expert, and play a full game of Bagh Chal right in your browser, free and without an account.

Open Bagh Chal → Rules and strategy guide included

Frequently Asked Questions

Which one did you play? For some readers it will be marbles scattered across an alley, for others Dandi Biyo in an open field or endless rounds of Chungi after school let out. And if Bagh Chal is the one you remember, you don't need to find twenty pebbles and four stones anymore.

Play Bagh Chal Online on Merokalam →

Did we miss a traditional game from your village or childhood? Let us know.