Oware
A sowing game from West Africa, played on twelve houses with forty-eight seeds. The rules are short, and three of them surprise people the first time they happen. Those three are written out below rather than left to be discovered mid-game.
The rules
- The board is twelve houses, six each. Yours are the row nearest you, lettered A to F; your opponent's are a to f. Every house starts with four seeds.
- On your turn, lift ALL the seeds out of one of your own houses and drop them one at a time into the houses that follow, going counter-clockwise.
- Seeds are never dropped into a house you are only passing over, and they are never dropped back into the house you lifted them from. If you are holding twelve or more, you will go right round and skip your own house on the way past.
- If your LAST seed lands in one of your opponent's houses and leaves it holding exactly two or three, you capture that house.
- Then look at the house before it. If that one is also your opponent's and also holds two or three, you capture that too, and keep going back until one of them is not.
- Captured seeds are set aside and are yours. They never come back to the board.
- Exactly two or three. Not one, not four: a house holding four when your seed lands in it is a house you have just made safe.
The three that surprise people
- A move that would capture EVERY seed your opponent has takes nothing at all. The move is legal and you may play it, but the seeds stay where they are. This is not the site losing your move: leaving somebody with no seeds would leave them with no game.
- If your opponent has no seeds, you must play a house that reaches them. Only the houses that can actually get a seed across are offered to you, and the page says so before you try.
- If you cannot reach them, the game ends there and you take every seed on your own side. Being unable to move is rewarded in this game, which is the opposite of most.
How a game ends
- There are forty-eight seeds, so capturing twenty-five wins: more than half, and your opponent can no longer catch up.
- Twenty-four each is a draw.
- A game can also end because nobody could feed the other side, as above, and then the seeds on the board go to whoever could not move.
- THIS SITE STOPS A GAME THAT IS GOING NOWHERE. If the same position comes round three times, or if five hundred moves pass with nothing captured, each side takes the seeds on its own half and the game is scored there. That is a rule of this site and not a rule of Oware, which ends such a game only when both players agree to.
- A game also ends if somebody resigns, or if a move deadline passes without a move: the deadline is set when the game is made, and running out of time loses it.
Worth knowing before you start
- Seeds sitting in front of you are not yours. Only captured seeds count, and a row full of seeds is a row your opponent is about to harvest.
- Houses holding one or two seeds are the ones that get captured, so a row of ones is a row in trouble.
- A house with twelve or more in it goes all the way round and comes back, which is slow to build and hard to answer.
Oware is played across West Africa and the Caribbean under many names, and its rules vary with them. The set above is the Abapa rules, the ones used for serious play.