Oware

Ghana, the Akan. It's the most widely played mancala game in West Africa.

Who moves first?

You don't need an account or an email, and there's nothing to install. You'll get a link to send to the person you want to play.

How to play

The board

The board has twelve pits in two rows of six, with a store at each end.
The six pits nearest you are yours. The store on your side holds what you have captured.
Four seeds start in every pit, forty-eight in all.

Sowing

On your turn you lift every seed out of one of your own pits and drop them one at a time into the pits that follow, going anticlockwise.
Sowing carries on round the whole board, through your opponent's pits and back into yours.
You never drop a seed into a store on the way past. Only captured seeds go into the stores.
A pit holding twelve or more goes all the way round and skips the pit it started from, so that pit ends up empty.

Capturing

If your last seed lands in one of your opponent's pits, and that pit then holds exactly two or three seeds, you take them.
You then look at the pit before it and take that too, if it is also your opponent's and also holds two or three.
Capturing runs backwards like that until a pit breaks the run, or until you reach your own side.

Feeding your opponent

If your opponent has no seeds at all, you have to play a move that puts some on their side.
If no move you have can do that, the game ends there and every seed left on the board is yours.

Winning

Twenty-five seeds wins, because that is more than half of forty-eight.
Twenty-four each is a draw.
If a hundred half-moves pass with nothing captured, the game ends there. Each player gets the seeds still sitting on their side of the board.

Which rules do we use?

We play Abapa, the tournament rules of the Oware Society and the World Oware Federation.

Mancala is a family of games, and even oware on its own is played by several sets of rules that really disagree. So we tell you which one we use.

They disagree about the grand slam. That's a move that would capture every seed your opponent has.

Here: The move is legal and you play it, but you capture nothing. Your opponent keeps their seeds and the game goes on.
Elsewhere: Some rule sets forbid the move outright. Others allow the capture and end the game on the spot.

This is oware, not kalah. Sowing goes round the whole ring and never drops a seed into a store on the way past. If you learned kalah, that's the difference you'll notice first.

Abapa is the standard of the Oware Society and the World Oware Federation.