नवकंकरी
Hindi, from Sanskrit · India
Nine pebbles
Navakankari is a compound of nava, nine, and kankari, a pebble or small stone — so the name says exactly what the game is: nine pebbles. It is the term Indian retailers put on the box, the one traditional-games writing treats as canonical, and the one that reads naturally in Hindi because it comes from Sanskrit rather than from English.
The board and the rules are the standard nine-piece game. Nine pieces each, place them on the twenty-four points, then slide them along the lines; three in a row takes an enemy piece; you lose at two pieces or when you cannot move. Anything you learn on this site transfers exactly.
A different word in almost every language
India does not have one name for this game, it has a dozen, and they do not agree. Gujarati has navkakri, close to the Sanskrit. Kannada has saalu mane ata and jodpi ata, and also char-par. In the Hindi belt the colloquial name is char bhar, which is what most of the Indian phone apps are called. Telugu and Tamil use daadi.
That last one is worth stating plainly, because it is the name most often mislabelled online: daadi is South Indian. It turns up in the titles of Indian shopping listings alongside Navakankari, which makes it look pan-Indian, but the traditional-games sources place it in Telugu and Tamil. Calling the Hindi page daadi would aim it at readers who are searching in a different language.
How old, and how certain
Boards scratched into stone are found across India as they are across Europe, and the game is often described as having been played here since antiquity. That is plausible and probably true, but scratches in rock are close to impossible to date, and confident numbers attached to them deserve suspicion — the same caution applies to the frequently repeated 1400 BC date for the Egyptian boards.
What is not in doubt is that the game is genuinely part of Indian household play rather than an import: it has its own vocabulary in every regional language, which is not what a recently borrowed game looks like.
The full rules are on how to play, the tactics on strategy, and the other boards on variants.