About AtlasTales
AtlasTales is a small atlas of world board games for ages 9–14. Play a living classic from a different part of the world — then find out where and when it comes from on The Atlas. Games are one of the oldest things humans made together, and they carry the story of the people who played them.
The twelve games so far
- 🌿 Alquerque — from the ancient Near East and later medieval Iberia. Men jump each other along a web of lines; it is the ancestor of checkers.
- 🌀 Brandubh — a Celtic and Norse tafl siege game. An uneven fight: the King runs for a corner while the attackers try to trap him. Learning to play both sides is the lesson.
- 🌰 Oware — a sowing game of the Akan people of West Africa, from the mancala family. You scatter seeds around the board and count your way to the biggest harvest.
- 🪶 Fanorona — the national board game of Madagascar. Sweep whole lines of stones off the board by stepping toward them or away from them — and chain your captures across the board in a single turn.
- 🐚 Congkak — a lap-sowing mancala from maritime Southeast Asia. Sow shells around two long rows and your own house, chaining lap after lap, and sweep the pit straight across from where you land.
- 🌙 The Royal Game of Ur — from ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest games we can still play (its rules were decoded from a clay tablet). Race seven pieces along a lucky track; land on a rosette to throw again, or send a rival back to the start.
- ☥ Senet — from ancient Egypt. Its real rules are lost, so this is one scholarly reconstruction — a dice-race down a snaking 30-square track, swapping past your rival and dodging the House of Water.
- 🪷 Cờ Gánh — a village game from Đà Nẵng and Quảng Nam in Vietnam. Its name means "carrying chess": you never capture a piece off the board — you carry a rival between two of yours and it switches to your side, so all sixteen pieces stay in play the whole game.
- 🐾 Cờ Chân Chó — a Vietnamese schoolyard game whose name means "dog's-paw chess", drawn in dirt or chalk. There is no capturing at all: you step your three tokens along a little star of lines and try to box your rival in — if they cannot move on their turn, they lose.
- 🪨 Ô Ăn Quan — a Vietnamese folk mancala ("mandarin square capturing") played with pebbles on a stone or chalk board. Sow your pebbles around a ring of pits (you pick which way to go), and snap up a pit that sits just past an empty one — eating a big Quan pot is the jackpot. When both Quan are gone, whoever gathered the most pebbles wins.
- 🐘 Makruk — Thai chess, a living cousin of the medieval game that also became the chess you may know. The pieces start closer together, the Met (queen) is shy — one diagonal step — and a Bia (pawn) turns into a Met on the sixth row. Trap the enemy Khun (king) with no escape to win. (Makruk's counting draw is simplified here to repetition + a no-progress cap.)
- 🐎 Cờ Cá Ngựa — a Vietnamese horse-race game ("horse chess"), the local cousin of ludo and pachisi. Roll a six to gallop a horse out of its stable, race it around the shared cross-shaped circuit, then turn up your own home column — but a rival that lands on a lone horse sends it all the way back to the stable. Park two of your horses on one square to make a block — a wall your rival cannot pass or land on, so it is a real defensive move, not just luck. You need the exact number to bring a horse home; first to get all four home wins.
One engine, many boards
Every game here runs on the same small rules engine. Instead of writing a new program for each game, each board is described as data — its shape, how the pieces move, and how you win — and one engine reads that description and plays. It is a neat idea from computer science: the games look completely different, but underneath they share a handful of moves (step, jump, sandwich, sweep, sow). That is also why the atlas can keep growing: a new classic is a new description, not a whole new program.
Fair, honest, and yours
The bot is a friendly, level-pickable study opponent — a real thinker, but beatable, never a perfect solver. You can also play two-players on one device. Each ruleset is one common, documented reconstruction (many traditional games have local variants). Every move is judged by an exact, deterministic engine pinned by automated tests, so play is fair and the same on any device. For the dice games (Ur and Senet), you throw on your own device and the throw is what moves — the engine never re-rolls behind your back.