An old South Indian race game played on a 5×5 cloth with cowrie shells.
Throw the 4 shells. Open mouths count: 1, 2 or 3 steps.
All four mouths is CHOWKA (4), all four humps is BAARA (8). Both let you throw again!
Tap a bouncing friend to move them, or use ← → and Enter.
Land on someone and they go BOOP back home.
The four star squares are safe: nobody can be booped there.
Get all 4 friends to the lotus in the middle to win. 🪷
Advanced rules 🎓
You can only turn inward after you've booped someone.
Two friends on one square pair up as a tollu 🔗, still boopable.
Roll a 2 to toughen a tollu into a gatti 🛡️: it moves together at half speed on even rolls (2 → 1, 4 → 2, 8 → 4), and only another gatti can pass or boop it.
Version
Play Chowka Bara online, free
Chowka Bara is the traditional South Indian race game played with four
cowrie shells. The board above is the full game. No download, no
sign-up, nothing to install. Play against the computer, or pick
pass-and-play for two to four people sharing one phone. It's also known
as Ashta Chamma in Telugu, Daayam in
Tamil, and Chowka Bhara in Kannada.
How to play Chowka Bara
Tap the shells to throw them. Count how many land mouth-up. That's how
many steps you move. Then pick which of your four tokens to move.
Throw the four cowrie shells.
Move one token that many steps along your path.
Land exactly on an opponent and they go back home.
Race around the outer loop, then the inner loop, then into the
centre, the lotus.
First player to bring all four tokens home to the lotus wins.
Four shells are thrown together and each lands either mouth-up or
mouth-down. Most throws are worth what you'd expect, but the two clean
sweeps are the lucky ones, and they're where the game's Telugu name,
Ashta Chamma, comes from.
Mouths up
You move
Throw again?
1
1 step
No
2
2 steps
No
3
3 steps
No
All four up
4 steps (Chamma)
Yes
None up
8 steps (Ashta)
Yes
Strategies to win Chowka Bara
Chowka Bara looks like pure luck, but the choice of which token
to move is where games are won.
Spread out early. Four tokens bunched together on
one stretch of the loop can all be captured by the same unlucky
sequence. Spacing them gives you more options on every throw.
Sit on the safe squares. The four crossed home
squares are the only cells where a token can't be captured. Parking
there while you wait for a useful throw costs you nothing.
Count backwards from the lotus. A token needs an
exact count to finish; it can't overshoot. Keeping one token a
flexible distance out beats racing it to within one step and then
being stuck waiting for a 1.
Capture before you commit inward. Under Advanced
rules you can't enter the inner loop at all until you've captured
someone, so an early capture isn't just points; it's your entry
ticket.
How is Ashta Chamma different?
Mostly the name and the region. Chowka Bara is the Kannada name,
Ashta Chamma the Telugu one, and the cowrie scoring is identical. The
real differences are board size (Ashta Chamma is often played on a
larger seven-house board) and the pairing rules, which traditional
Ashta Chamma usually skips.
See the Ashta Chamma rules →
Tamil Nadu's Daayam is a bigger
departure: it's thrown with long stick dice instead of cowrie shells,
and tokens need a specific roll just to leave home.
What's the difference between Basic and Advanced rules?
Basic is a straight race: move, capture, finish.
Good for a first game or playing with kids.
Advanced adds the traditional complications:
you must capture an opponent before any token may enter the inner loop;
two of your tokens on one square form a tollu pair; and rolling
a 2 hardens that pair into a gatti 🛡️, which moves at half
speed on even throws but can't be passed or captured by anything except
another gatti. Switch between them above the board before you start.
What else is Chowka Bara called?
The game travelled by being played rather than published, so almost
every region has its own name for it, and if you grew up with it,
the name you know is probably not the one on this page:
Some of these are the same game under a different name; others have
drifted into genuinely different rules. The
history of the game covers how that happened.
Is Chowka Bara free to play here?
Yes, completely. There's no download, no app store, no account, and no
payment. The game runs in your browser on a phone, tablet, or computer.
Can I play with friends?
Yes. Choose Pass & Play above the board and set it
to two, three, or four players. Everyone shares one device and takes
turns throwing, the way the game is played around a board drawn on the
ground. Online play with a shareable link isn't available yet.
Do I need cowrie shells?
Not here. The shells are on screen, and tapping the tray throws them.
If you're playing the physical game, four cowrie shells are
traditional, but four coins work identically: heads counts as
mouth-up.
Read this in your language
The rules are also written in Telugu, Tamil and Kannada: