← Games Our Grandparents Played

West Africa, played across Africa and the Caribbean

Oware

Also called awari, ayo; a mancala game

Oware belongs to the mancala family of sowing games, among the oldest board games still played.

It is played on a carved board of two rows of six pits, and has a strong tournament tradition in Ghana and among the Akan people.

The rules, briefly

• Each pit starts with four seeds, forty-eight in all.
• Scoop all the seeds from one of your pits and sow them one by one, anticlockwise, into the following pits.
• If your last seed lands in an opponent's pit and makes two or three there, you capture them, and the pits before it too while they also hold two or three.

Try this: Count where the last seed lands

Before every move, count the seeds and point to the pit where the last one will fall. Good players do this for their opponent's best move too.

Play on AtlasTales (two players, one screen)

Read more: Oware on Wikipedia. Written from published sources; if your family plays it differently, write your rules down in Heirloom Rules, and if something here is wrong, tell us: hello@sparkanvil.org.