Ask anyone who grew up in Bangladesh about gollachut and watch their face change. Most of us played it in a school field, an empty lot behind the houses or on a riverbank in the late afternoon, until someone's mother called us home.
How it's played
The name says it all. Golla is a circle, and chhut is a regional word for "run". A stick is planted in the ground and a circle is drawn around it. A boundary line, or a second stick or a tree, is marked 25 to 30 feet away.
Two teams line up with the same number of players, usually five or seven. The captain of the running team, the goda, holds the planted stick with one hand and a teammate's hand with the other. The rest join on, and the whole chain circles the stick together.
Then the runners break from the chain and race for the far target. The other team waits outside the circle, ready to tag them. Touch the target and you're free. Get tagged on the way and you're out for the round. If nobody from the running team makes it, the other side wins the round.
Why it stays with us
Gollachut doesn't need a ball, a board or a single taka. It needs a stick, a patch of ground and enough friends to make a chain. It's loud and fast, and the best moment is the one just before you let go of the hand next to you and run.
It's still played across the country, and Wikipedia lists it as especially popular around Dhaka, Mymensingh, Faridpur, Madaripur, Barisal, Khulna and Pabna. For a lot of us, though, it lives mostly in memory now, along with the rooftops, courtyards and long school breaks it belonged to.
Why we named the site after it
Gollachut Games is our way of breaking from the chain for a little while. We're bringing back the games we played as children (the board games, the courtyard games, the rooftop kites and the river races) so you can play them again on your phone, wherever you are now, with whoever you used to play with.
We can't fit a real gollachut circle on a screen yet. But every game here starts from the same feeling: the moment before you run.
Pick a game and see which memories come back.