Smalltalk Ninja Board Games All the boards

Dara

Nigeria, the Dakarkari — and much of the Sahel, under half a dozen other names.

Who moves first?

No account, no email, nothing to install. You get a link to send to whoever you want to play.

How to play

The board

Thirty cells, six across and five down. It starts empty.
Twelve pieces each, which leaves six cells free once everything is down.

Placing your pieces

You take turns putting one piece on any empty cell, until all twenty-four are placed.
Rows made while placing do not count for anything. Nothing is captured in this phase.

Moving

Once every piece is down, a turn is moving one piece one cell up, down, left or right.
Pieces never move diagonally and never jump.
With only six free cells, there is far less room than the board suggests.

Making a row

Three of your pieces side by side in a straight line lets you take one enemy piece off the board.
A row is exactly three. A fourth piece joining your own line destroys it, so you can ruin your position by advancing into it.
A row left behind by breaking up a longer line does not count.
A move that makes two rows at once still takes only one piece.
You may not take a piece that is itself in a row, unless every piece your opponent has left is in one.

Winning

A player who can no longer make a row of three has lost.
A row of three sitting beside a row of two can be remade every single turn, by sliding one piece back and forth. That takes a piece each time and ends the game quickly. It is not a fault in the board — it is the sharpest thing in the game.

Which rules are these?

Dara on a board of thirty cells, five rows by six.

Dara is played across much of the Sahel under half a dozen names, and the published descriptions of it disagree in three places.

Where they part company, this board plays as follows.

One piece for two rows: A move that makes two rows at once takes one enemy piece rather than two. It is also what nine men's morris does for a move closing two mills, and answering the same question two ways in two games would mean one of them was wrong.
A broken line does not score: Sliding a piece out of a line of four and back again does not make a scoring row. Without this the game has a free capture every second move, for ever.
The size of the board: Five by six. Six by six and seven by six are also played.

Do not read dala's rules into dara. The names are one letter apart, dala scores rows while pieces are still being placed, and dala's board is six by six.

The reading here follows en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dara_(game).