Bashni

Bashni is a Russian board game and abstract strategy variant of draughts (checkers), first documented in 1875 in a collection titled Collection of Games for Family and School published in Saint Petersburg. It is played by two players on a standard draughts board using the ordinary rules of Russian draughts, but with one defining rule change: when a piece captures an opposing piece by jumping over it, the captured piece is not removed from the board. Instead it is placed beneath the capturing piece, forming a stack, or tower (bashnya in Russian, hence the name), that thereafter moves and captures as a single unit. Over the course of a game these towers grow taller and can be captured whole by an opposing jump, changing hands piece by piece rather than being eliminated outright. Because pieces accumulate instead of leaving the board, Bashni produces longer, more combinatorially complex games than ordinary draughts, and the game has drawn interest from mathematicians studying combinatorics and game theory as a variant of the wider draughts family.