Ming Mang (game)

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Ming Mang is a two-player abstract strategy board game from Tibet. Ming Mang 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)),[1][2] but pronounced Ming Mang or Mi Mang.[2] The term Mig Mang is also applied to Tibetan Go[1] with both games using exactly the same board which is a 17 x 17 square board, and black and white pieces.[2][3] 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,[4] but some state that it means "many eyes".[1][2] The game may also be known as Gundru (or Gun-dru).[5] The game was popular among some Tibetan monks before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, and the uprising in 1959,[6] and among aristocratic families.[2]

Tibetans in their diaspora have had to make use of whatever board was available be it a 19 x 19 Go board,[3][6] or an 8 x 8 checkered board from draughts or checkers[3] 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 is related to Jul-Gonu, Hasami shogi, Dai hasami shogi, Mak-yek, Apit-Sodok, Seega, Ludus latrunculorum, and Petteia. The game is also possibly related 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; 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.

Mig Mang was published by H.J.R. Murray in his 1913 work A History of Chess.[1] Another 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.[1][5]

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.

Rules

Other Rules

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.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Shotwell, Peter. A Form of Tibetan Mig-Mang From the West?. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 West, Andrew (4 March 2006). "Tibetan Go". BabelStone Blog. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Walker, Damian. "Ming Mang (Leaflet #55)". Cyningstan Traditional Board Games. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  4. ↑ Bue, Erberto F. Lo (2011). Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the IATS, 2003. Volume 13: Art in Tibet Issues in Traditional Tibetan Art From the Seventh to Twentieth Century. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. p. 146. ISBN 9789004155190.
  5. 1 2 Winther, Mats. "Tibetan Gundru". Board games. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  6. 1 2 Botermans, Jack (2008). The Book of Games: Strategy, Tactics & History (1st. ed.). New York, NY / London: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. pp. 619–626. ISBN 978-1-4027-4221-7. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
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