Kotu Ellima

Kotu Ellima is a two-player abstract strategy board game from Sri Lanka (formerly called Ceylon) played by the Sinhalese people. The game was documented by Henry Parker in Ancient Ceylon: An Account of the Aborigines and of Part of the Early Civilisation (1909); the game was printed as "Kotu Ellima" which is actually a misspelling because his source for the game was Leopold Ludovici's Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1873), and specifically in the chapter entitled "The Sports and Games of the Singhalese", and Ludovici wrote the name of the game as Kotu Ellime or Taking of the Castles.Singhalese is an archaic spelling of SinhaleseTaking of the Castles may not be an actual Sinhalese-to-English translation of Kotu Ellime. Kotu may not actually be a Sinhalese word, but a close Sinhalese word is koti which means tiger. But Kotu may actually be an arachaic spelling of the Tamil word for castle which is Kōṭṭai. The Tamils are also an ethnolinguistic group inhabiting Sri Lanka. It's unsure what ellime may actually mean in English. The game is similar to draughts (checkers) and Alquerque as players hop over one another's pieces to capture them; it is more similar to Alquerque between the two since it uses a standard Alquerque board. However, unlike draughts and standard Alquerque, the game is played on an expanded Alquerque board consisting of four triangular boards attached to the four sides of a standard Alquerque board. It closely resembles peralikatuma and sixteen soldiers (or sholo guti) which are also played in Sri Lanka and other parts of the Indian subcontinent with the only difference being the number of pieces. In sixteen soldiers, each player has 16 pieces hence the name of the game. In peralikatuma, each player has 23 pieces. In Kotu Ellima, each player has 24 pieces, and at the beginning of the game the whole board is covered with them except the central point reminiscent of standard alquerque.