Pasang (game)

Pasang is a two-player abstract strategy board game that originated in Brunei, played on an eleven by eleven grid of one hundred twenty intersection points with a two by two empty square left open at the center and diagonal guide lines running from the corners toward it. One player controls black tokens worth one point each and the other controls white tokens worth two points each, arranged on the board in traditional starting patterns, while each side also commands a single mobile piece called a ka that moves along the lines to capture the opposing stationary tokens orthogonally. Play unfolds across three distinct phases with different capture mechanics, and a player who cannot make a legal capture on their turn loses the game outright, making forced captures central to the strategy. The game ends when all tokens have been captured, and victory goes to whichever player has accumulated the higher point total, weighting white tokens more heavily than black. A possible historical relative was documented by the folklorist Stewart Culin in 1898 under the name Chuki in Malaysia, describing a board of identical size and an identical total of one hundred twenty pieces split evenly between the two colors.