Mak-yek (Thai: หมากแยก, RTGS: mak yaek) is a two-player abstract strategy board game played in Thailand and Myanmar.
But Captain James Low's description of Maak yék does include custodian capture for a line of enemy pieces.
[note 3][6] This is a contrast as to how Mak-yek's pieces are initially set up which are on the first and third row nearest each player.
As an English translation from the Malay language, apit means squeezed,[7] and this is associated with custodian capture.
[9] The game is played on an 8 x 8 uncheckered square board with each player having 16 pieces similar to Mak-yek and Apit-sodok.
All pieces including the king move orthogonally any number of unobstructed squares on the board as in the rook of chess.
Rek is a transitive verb which means "carry on one's shoulder a pole at each end of which is a container, bundle or object", and the two containers at each end of the pole are symbolic of the two pieces captured through intervention and are carried away by the player performing the capture.
[9] Another game that employs custodian capture is Gala from Sulawesi (formerly called Celebes), an island of Indonesia.
Black moves first and places one piece on the central square (which is called the soelisañgka by the Bugis people of Sulawesi).
Murray describes that pieces move orthogonally any number of unoccupied spaces as in the Rook in Chess, and never diagonally.
These commonalities suggest that they may form a subfamily within the family of games that also includes Jul-Gonu, Hasami shogi, Dai hasami shogi, Ming Mang, Gundru, Seega, Ludus latrunculorum, Petteia, and Firdawsi’s Nard.
They also bear resemblance to the Tafl games which exhibit custodian capture and rook-like movement of pieces except that the Tafl games are asymmetrical in the number and type of pieces each player possess, and the objective in Tafl games is for one player to move their king to the edge of the board with the objective of the other player to capture that king.
They distantly resemble Agon, Awithlaknakwe, Bizingo, Watermelon Chess, Reversi, and Othello as all of these games exhibit custodian capture or some form of it.
Rek and Min Rek Chanh's "custodian" capturing method resembles that of Watermelon Chess where the player performing the capture must completely surround their opponent's piece (or possibly pieces as in the case of Rek) with or without the aid of the edge(s) of the board, and in such a way that the captured piece(s) cannot perform a legal move (hypothetically on the opponent's next turn).
Moreover, the first move of the game (which is made by Black) is required to be placed on the central square.
The second version of Mak-yek might be a hunt game, but one of the more rare ones that use a square board as in Fox and Hounds, except in Fox and Hounds capture by leap (or any form of capture) is not allowed, but in Mak-yek it is allowed.