Somewhere in the foothills of Nepal, elders still gather around a wooden board carved into a five-by-five grid, moving carved tigers and goats across its intersections with calm concentration. The game is called Bagh-chal – literally, “Tiger Move” – and has been played here for a thousand years. MOST Young Nepalis have never heard and that’s a shame. At present, in the deserts and mountain ranges of Western Asia, Bagh-chal is being played on a very large scale.
The US-Israel-Iran war, for now, is frozen. Washington rejected Tehran’s proposal. Tehran rejected Washington’s. After months of airstrikes, proxy battles and nervously watching oil prices, the conflict has settled into something neither side wanted – a stalemate. To understand how this happened, forget the think-tank reports for a moment. Take out a Bagh-chal board instead.
A game of asymmetrical opponents
Bagh-chal is not a fair game, and that is exactly the point. This game is between two opponents, whom we call “Tiger” and “Crow”. Four tigers face twenty goats in a network of twenty-five intersections.
Tigers are fast, aggressive and dangerous – they can jump on goats and knock them off the board. Win the game by catching five goats, and the tigers have done their job. Goats, slow and individually weak, have a completely different task: surround the tigers, block any possible movement and grind the game to the end.
This is not a trivial mathematical problem, but a strategic balance. As noted by researchers Lim Yew Jin and Jurg Nievergelt, Bagh-chal always ends in a tie when both players play optimally. Loss for either party is usually associated with suboptimal performance. The size of the game tree for Bagh-chal can reach 104¹, similar to that of chess; however, the result will generally be a win, a loss or a draw. The Tigers are simply too powerful to beat, but they could face a loss or a draw.
What the game knows, but which the modern military strategist all too easily forgets, is that power does not equal victory. The tiger can eat four goats and still not win the game. Can without position is just a mess.
Tiger strike
Operation Epic Fury was initiated by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026. It was a massive undertaking that included attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, its missile production, its military generals and even the residence of the supreme leader. Bases and support from Gulf Cooperation Council countries were made available. For a few weeks, it looked like the Tigers were really enjoying their game.
Iran’s conventional navy was degraded. Its air defenses were hit repeatedly. Senior commanders were killed. The kind of damage that would have crippled a lesser state was done, and the world watched. American and Israeli planners had done their homework on difficult targets. Their intelligence was good, their ammunition accurate, their execution disciplined.
However, there comes the point where Bagh-chal’s analogy works best: A tiger that runs ahead in the game and takes a goat at the same time eventually ends up running away from its own forces; the tiger wins the battle but loses the war. The situation was exactly this: the US-Israeli axis continued to win battle after battle while losing strategic ground.
Iran’s geography—the Zagros Mountains, scattered underground facilities, a network of proxy forces spread across four countries—made it nearly impossible to deliver a knockout blow. Each hit that degraded one node activated three more. The Strait of Hormuz was cut off. The infrastructure of the GCC took retaliatory blows. Global energy markets crashed. What was intended as a quick campaign of austerity became, gradually and then immediately, a protracted war of attrition.
Goats carry the board
Iran’s strategy for the past two decades has been to build precisely the kind of resilience that makes conventional superiority less useful. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, various militia networks in Iraq and Syria – these are not simply representatives of “terrorists” as the Americans and Israelis called them. They are, in Bagh-chal terms, carefully placed goats across the regional board. They don’t need to beat the tiger. They should make the board ungovernable.
And that’s what they did. As Iran absorbed the punitive attacks—thousands of civilian casualties, millions displaced, significant damage to its conventional military—the “mosaic” of its national security architecture held together. Cutting off leadership heads did not bring collapse. Adapted institutions. Representatives filled in the blanks. The supreme irony of modern asymmetric conflict is that the side that absorbs the most punishment is not necessarily the side that is losing.
This is where the “goat” strategy comes into play. Take losses, stick together, sacrifice when required and always block the tigers from taking any clear path to victory. It is far from glorious. Of course it’s uncomfortable. But it does the job. In April 2026, when the ceasefire came, it reflected exactly this reality. Iran had not won. America had not won. Israel had not won. The board had been played to a draw—not because anyone chose it, but because optimal play by both sides, over months of brutal conflict, produced the result that Bagh-chal’s math predicted.
The GCC states are victims of multipolarity
The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council deserve a specific mention as well because their position in the current situation was very difficult for them. They were nominally part of the US-Israel offensive operation, but became subject to Iranian retaliatory operations in which they wanted no part.
As seen from Bagh-Chal’s eyes, it was a herd unable to hold together. Not out of fear, but because it only takes common sense to understand that it is not safe to be sandwiched between tigers and goats fighting for the board.
Meanwhile, China and Russia provided Iran with the kind of indirect support — economic lifelines, diplomatic cover, weapons components — that propped up the scapegoat when it might otherwise have faltered. The multipolar world, which Moscow and Beijing have been defending for years, found a concrete expression in this conflict: the dominance of the Tigers was not challenged by a single rival, but by a structural change in the way the board was organized.
What the game shows us
Bagh-chal was not created as a political theory. It was designed as fun, as a test of wits between neighbors on a winter’s evening. But games that survive a thousand years tend to have some truth about the world encoded into them.
This will not be the first time the powerful state learns this lesson the hard way. West Asia, similar to Bagh-chal, requires patience and formation rather than haste and violence. Goats don’t need to bleat. They are simply required to stay put.
The Iran conflict of 2026 has some lessons worth bearing in mind:
1) Material superiority does not automatically translate into strategic victory. The US and Israel had tremendous conventional advantages. They achieved everything their wish lists required. And they still couldn’t force Iran into the result they wanted.
2) Endurance is a form of strength. Iran’s ability to absorb punishment and continue to function—economically, militarily, institutionally—was itself a strategic weapon. Resistance is not passive. It is the deliberate construction of a system designed to absorb shock.
3) What constitutes a win is an evolving concept. Ten years ago, winning the Iran problem involved regime change or total denuclearization. Now, after Epic Fury, there is a hushed conversation about whether the status quo of nuclear deterrence is all that can realistically be achieved.
4) Board control is more important than the number of bodies. Iran has never matched US firepower. There was no need. It had to control enough of the regional space – through proxies, geography, economic leverage – that its opponents would have no clean sweep.
A millennial warning
There is something quietly humbling about watching the world’s most sophisticated military apparatus come to the same conclusion that Nepalese villagers built on a wooden board game a millennium ago.
You can be the tiger. You can be faster, stronger and better armed. You can catch goat after goat and feel the momentum of the game in your favor. And then you look up, and the board is surrounded. Every road ahead is blocked. You are not beaten – you are immobilized. And in this game, immobilization is the defeat of the tiger.
Bagh-chal is disappearing from Nepal. Young people don’t play it anymore; screens are more fun than carved wooden boards. This is unfortunate, because the game carries a warning that the screen is not giving clearly enough: in geopolitics as in Bagh-chal, the side that seems to be winning early is not always the side that wins in the end.
The tigers roared. The goats kept their formation. The board, for now, is contested – that’s exactly how the game was supposed to go.
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