Indian and jackrabbits
board game
Indian and jackrabbits is a two-player abstract strategy board game from the Tiwa tribe of Taos, New Mexico. A similar game with a slightly different board is also played by the Tohono O'odham tribe of Arizona. From the outset, these games look like hunt games similar to catch the hare, the fox games of Europe, and the tiger and leopard games of Asia, because they use very similar boards, and the game mechanics (movement abilities and capturing rules) are the same, and the number of pieces each player controls is different. However, they are not the same games, because the goals are completely different. The goal of the one Indian is to capture just one of the twelve jackrabbits. The goal of the jackrabbits is to move themselves safely onto the other side of the board mirroring their initial positions.
The game is unrelated to any other despite similarities in board design and mechanics. Indian and jackrabbits may actually be a game isolate.
The game was described by Stewart Culin in his book Games of the North American Indians Volume 2: Games of Skill (1898) on page 798.
Goal
The Indian wins if it captures one jackrabbit.
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This entry incorporates text from “Indian and jackrabbits” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.