Mak-yek (, ) is a two-player abstract strategy board game played in Thailand and Myanmar. Players move their pieces as in the rook in chess and attempt to capture their opponent's pieces through custodian and intervention capture. The game may have been first described in literature by Captain James Low a writing contributor in the 1839 work Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, For Inquiring into The History, The Antiquities, The Arts and Sciences, and Literature of Asian, Second Part of the Twentieth Volume in which he wrote chapter X On Siamese Literature and documented the game as Maak yék.
Rules
- There is no special way of deciding who starts the game.
- Players take turns moving one of their men horizontally or vertically like the rook in chess (i.e. not through pieces), capturing the opponent's pieces through custodian capture and intervention capture. The captured pieces are removed immediately from the board.
- Intervention capture is the opposite of custodian. If a piece moves between two enemy pieces that are one square apart on a row or column, it captures both pieces.
- If both an intervention and custodian capture overlap in 1 line or column, the custodian capture takes precedence.
- The first player with no pieces left loses.
Variants
Apit-sodok
A Malaysian variant called Apit-sodok is closely related. The game is documented in R.J. Wilkinson's work Papers on Malay Subjects (1910), and Raja Samusah's article The Malay Game of Apit (1932), This is a contrast as to how Mak-yek's pieces are initially set up which are on the first and third row nearest each player. As an English translation from the Malay language, apit means squeezed, and this is associated with custodian capture. and this is associated with intervention capture.
Gala
Another game that employs custodian capture is Gala from Sulawesi (formerly called Celebes), an island of Indonesia. The game was described by Harold James Ruthven Murray in A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (1952) in which he references Walter Kaudern's Ethnographical studies in Celebes: Results of the author’s expedition to Celebes 1917–20, vol. 4: Games and dances in Celebes. (1929) as his source, and Walter Kaudern in turn references Benjamin Frederik Matthes' "Makassaarsch-Hollandsch Woordenboe" (1859) and Ethnographische Atlas (1859) as his sources which are written in Dutch. Kaudern makes no attempt to translate the description and rules of the game from Matthes, and simply copies verbatim the passage from Matthes' book along with a diagram of the board. Murray attempts to describe it in English, although there may be a slight discrepancy with that of Matthe's, but Matthe's description may be unclear in some areas. Murray describes it as a two-player game played on a 7 x 7 square board of which the central square is marked with an X (or a cross) along with the middle square of each edge row (there are four edge rows, and they are the top-most and bottom-most ranks, and the left-most and right-most files of the board). This would describe a board containing five X's. However, in Kaudern's diagram of the board which is based upon Matthes', there are nine X's to be found on the board. The other four X's are to be found on the four corner squares of the board. One player plays 10 black pieces, and the other player plays with 13 white pieces. The game begins with an empty board. Black moves first and places one piece on the central square (which is called the soelisañgka by the Bugis people of Sulawesi). Murray states that play continues with each player alternating their turns placing one of their pieces on their half of the board (Matthes does not specifically mention that pieces are entered one at a time, although that may have been his intent). Matthes specifically mentions that a player's piece cannot be moved to the opponent's half of the board until all of their pieces have been entered on the board. Murray describes that pieces move orthogonally any number of unoccupied spaces as in the Rook in Chess, and never diagonally. Murray describes that pieces are captured by interception (custodian method) in which a single enemy piece is flanked on two orthogonally opposite sides by two pieces of the player performing the capture. Murray states that when one player has hemmed in all of the other player's pieces, that is, the other player's pieces are prevented from performing a legal move on their turn, the situation is called a "pōle" by the Bugis, and "bāttoe-mi nāi" by the Makassars of Sulawesi.
Gala should not be confused by another game of the same name which is a chess variant played in Northern Germany.
Hos Nip
"Hos" is a Thai checkers or Thai draught that use 8 x 8 eyes board with 8 pieces per team. Hos Nip (ฮอสหนีบ) or Maknip (หมากหนีบ) is a kind of Nipped Draught game that the setting up by using a row per team at the first and last far row on the board. The rule similar to Makyaek (หมากแยก).
Second version of Mak-yek
Both Captain James Low and H.J.R. Murray described a second version of Mak-yek which resembles more of a hunt game where one player possesses only one piece, and goes against another player with sixteen pieces. The player with one piece can move in any direction except diagonally, and capture a single enemy piece by leaping over it as long as there is an empty square behind it.