Bagh in Nepali means "tiger", and chal means "move", hence you could translate it as the "Tiger Moving Game" or "Move the Tigers".
Game Rules
Equipment
One player is the tiger (bagh) player with four tiger pieces, and the other
is the goat (bakhri) with 20 goat pieces. The gameboard consists of a grid of
25 points with lines of valid movement connecting them . Player movement is
along these lines from point to point, but notice there aren't lines between
every point so there are some restrictions to this movement.
The game could be played on a computer screen, on a specially made Bagh Chal
board with its game pieces, or even on a piece of notebook paper with the gameboard
pattern scrawled on it and with pennies and nickels for game pieces.
Setup
The four tigers are placed in the four corner points of the gameboard. (But
the goat will go first - see below.)
Object
There is a different object for each of the two players:
The tiger must jump ("capture") five goats to win. See Game Play for
details on tigers jumping goats. In some versions of the game the tiger player
must jump and capture all the goats to win, not just five, but friends and I
have found that once you've captured five goats, you've no problem capturing
the rest. So the five goats rule probably just came out of an interest in shortening
an inevitably lost game. Myself I prefer the five-goat rule.
The goat player must try to make it so there is no valid move left for any tiger before the tiger eats five of his goats (or all of them, if you prefer the long and tedious version of the game), by using the goats to crowd in on the tigers and prevent both jumping and regular movement. This can become particularly difficult if more than a few goats have been captured.
Game Play
Players take turns, moving or placing one piece per turn. The goat player goes
first.
Goat movement:
There are two phases of the game. In the first, the "setup" phase,
the goat player sets one goat on the gameboard per turn, but cannot move any
goats once they are on the board until all 20 goats have been played. In the
second phase, the "take-down" phase, which begins after the goat player
has played all 20 goats, the goat player may move one goat on the board per
turn along a movement line to an available, adjacent point on the gameboard.
Tiger
movement:
The tiger player may move one tiger per turn, either along a movement line to
an available, adjacent point on the gameboard, or by jumping a goat that is
accessible along a movement line and which has an open point on its far side
to land in. Goat-jumping may only be over a single goat. When a goat is jumped
it is removed from the gameboard and considered "captured".
Play continues
until one of the players wins by reaching their object (see Object section).