Growing up, I remember playing all these little board games. I used to be really good in mastermind, ‘fei ji qi’ (airplane chess), and Go boardgame.

Then again, there was my all time favorite, the Chinese Jungle Chess set.


Oh man, looking at this picture brings back old memories. Honestly? I’ve totally forgotten how to play the game! But for those of you who never knew it to begin with, there are basically 8 animals in this board games, and they are all ranked as the following, from the ‘strongest’ to the ‘weakest’.

8 - Elephant (Chinese: 象; pinyin: xiàng)
7 - Lion (simplified Chinese: 狮; traditional Chinese: 獅; pinyin: shī)
6 - Tiger (Chinese: 虎; pinyin: hǔ)
5 - Leopard (Chinese: 豹; pinyin: bào)
4 - Dog (Chinese: 狗; pinyin: gǒu)
3 - Wolf (Chinese: 狼; pinyin: hǎng, láng, lǎng, làng)
2 - Cat (Chinese: 貓; pinyin: māo)
1 - Mouse (Chinese: 鼠; pinyin: shǔ)

For example, elephant can ‘eat’ the animals ranked lower than it, just as lion can ‘eat’ tiger, and leopard and dog and so on… Well you get the picture. Your goal is to lead your herd of animals across the board game, leaping across mountainous terrains, traps, rivers and rival animals to reach the other end!

The only odd part is that somehow, the mouse ‘eats’, of all things, the elephant… And for the longest time afterwards, I always had this misconception that somehow in the wild, mice feed on elephants.

Oh well… maybe they do.

But if there’s one board game that I wished I had mastered back when I was young, it would definitely be Backgammon. Good thing there’s this website which allows you to play online backgammon with people all over the world. Turns out it isn’t too late yet for me to start to play backgammon now, even at age 22! Haha! This website lists all the possible tournaments and apparently you can even play to win money!


How about playing backgammon online for a living? Now that's a profession even I would never have thought about.

What about you guys? What were you favourite childhood board game?