Ming Mang (game)

Ming Mang () is a two-player abstract strategy board game from Tibet. is also a general term for the word "boardgame" in Tibet. The correct name and spelling of the game may actually be Mig Mang(s) (or Mig-Mang(s)), but pronounced Ming Mang or Mi Mang. The term Mig Mang is also applied to Tibetan Go with both games using exactly the same board which is a 17 x 17 square board, and black and white pieces. Mig is in reference to the chart (the pattern of horizontal and vertical lines) of the board, and Mangs refers to the notion that the more charts are used on the board, the more pieces are needed to play the game, but some state that it means "many eyes". The game may also be known as Gundru (or Gun-dru). The game was popular among some Tibetan monks before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, and the uprising in 1959, and among aristocratic families.
Tibetans in their diaspora have had to make use of whatever board was available be it a 19 x 19 Go board, or an 8 x 8 checkered board from draughts or checkers and orthodox chess. It is also played on other sized square boards.
Mig Mang utilizes custodian capture of enemy pieces or a line of enemy pieces, and the captured pieces are replaced with the pieces of the player performing the capture(s); it thus resembles the games of Reversi and Othello in these respects. Each player's pieces are initially situated on two adjacent sides of the board (see diagram), and move orthogonally any number of unoccupied spaces like the rook in chess. It is an elimination game, as the objective is to capture all of the opponent's pieces. As such the game resembles Jul-Gonu, Hasami shogi, Dai hasami shogi, Mak-yek, Apit-sodok, Rek (Game), Seega, Ludus latrunculorum, and Petteia. The game also bears some resemblance to Go, Baduk, and Weiqi since Mig Mang uses the same 17 x 17 square board as Tibetan Go which is related to the other three games, and Mig Mang is often played with Go's 19 x 19 square board [Confusing since picture below shows an 8 x 8 board]; custodian capture is somewhat related to the capture method in Go, as both methods surround or outflank enemy pieces in capturing them. Other games that might be comparable are Ataxx and its variant Hexxagōn, as these two games capture enemy pieces by placing pieces adjacent to them and converting them into their own pieces.
A work by a Tibetan woman, Rin-chen Lha-mo, "We Tibetans" (1926) describes a possible variation of the Mig-Mang rules which have been interpreted to include captures of a piece or a group of pieces that turn perpendicularly such as around corners of the board, which are generally difficult to capture using the regular custodian method; moreover, she states that when one of the players has only one piece left, it develops the additional power to leap over the other player's pieces and capture them as in draughts or Alquerque.
Setup.
The game is played on an n x n square board, but traditionally it was played on a 17×17 square board. But varying board sizes are played with including the 8×8 square board depicted in the diagram, and it's this 8×8 square board that will be described here-in-forth with respect to the setup and rules. To start the game, each player needs 14 pieces on the board. However, each player has an additional 14 pieces in order to replace captured enemy pieces on the board. One player plays the white pieces and the other plays the black pieces, however, any two colors are appropriate.
Instead of an additional 14 pieces per player, pieces with one side white and the other side black can be used similar to those used in Reversi and Othello, that way captured pieces are simply turned over to the colors of the player who performed the capture.
Players decide what colored pieces to play, and who will start first.
The game starts with each player's 14 pieces lined up on two adjacent sides of the board as depicted on the diagram. Each player's remaining 14 pieces are set beside the board as their respective stockpile.
Strategy and Concepts.
As a player continues to capture more enemy pieces, he or she is also amassing more pieces (that he or she can use) since captured enemy pieces are replaced with the player's pieces from their stockpile.