Jungle (board game)

Jungle, also widely known by its Chinese name Dou Shou Qi or animal chess, is a traditional Chinese two-player board game played on a small grid representing a jungle terrain of dens, traps and rivers, in which each side commands eight pieces ranked by animal strength from the elephant down to the rat. Pieces generally capture by moving onto a square occupied by an equal or weaker-ranked opposing piece, but the rat, the weakest piece by rank, can uniquely capture the strongest piece, the elephant, and pieces behave differently when swimming through river squares, so the game's core tactical puzzle revolves around exploiting these special rank-breaking and terrain rules rather than simple strength comparison. The objective is to maneuver any piece into the opponent's den, or to capture enough of the opponent's pieces that a win becomes forced, and the game is understood to have developed in China over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before spreading internationally under various commercial names including Jungle and Dou Shou Qi.