Mak-yek

Mak-yek is a two-player abstract strategy board game played in Thailand and Myanmar. It is played on an 8 by 8 square board, each player having sixteen men that are laid out on the first and third rows nearest them and that are told apart by color or design. Men move horizontally or vertically like the rook in chess, never through other pieces, and capture opponent men by custodian capture and by intervention capture, the captured men being removed at once. There is no special way of deciding who starts. The game may first have been described in literature by Captain James Low in the 1839 work Asiatic Researches, where he wrote it as Maak yek, and H. J. R. Murray later described it in his 1913 A History of Chess. A closely related Malaysian variant is called Apit-sodok.