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Southern Africa · Sotho, Tswana, Zulu

Morabaraba

also called Umlabalaba · Mmela

Morabaraba is played on a board of three nested squares joined by lines, on which each player places and then moves twelve pieces, called cows. Forming a line of three — a mill — lets you shoot one of the opponent's cows. It is played competitively in South Africa and Lesotho under codified tournament rules.

Played in: South Africa · Lesotho · Botswana · Eswatini

— The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Click or tap to play.

— What is playing against you

Completes a mill if it can, blocks yours if it must, otherwise searches two moves ahead.

Searches the game tree 2 moves ahead morabaraba-engine.ts — evaluate(), minimax()

Turns on a panel over the board listing the moves the machine considered on its last turn, the score it gave each one, and how many positions it examined to get there. The numbers are the engine's own.

Three rules run before any search: if a placement completes its own mill it plays it; if one blocks a mill of yours it plays that; only then does it search. The search is minimax with alpha-beta at two plies. Its scoring counts mills (10 each), two-in-a-rows (2 each), and material (3 per cow), from its side minus yours. Because the board now carries the four corner diagonals, each corner sits on three mills instead of two. Nothing in the AI was changed to account for that — it simply counts mills, so corners became more valuable to it automatically. That is a case where fixing the board improved the opponent without touching the opponent.

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What this version is not

Twelve cows a side, the three nested squares joined by four corner diagonals, mills along both the orthogonals and the diagonals, shooting on completing a mill, and flying once reduced to three cows are all implemented.

What is missing: the computer opponent searches only two moves ahead and plays weakly. Tournament conventions vary over whether a cow standing in a mill may be shot when no other target exists; this version allows it. Where a cow sits on more than one completed mill at once, only one is highlighted.

— How it is played

Each player has twelve cows. In the first phase players alternately place cows on empty points; in the second they move a cow along a line to an adjacent empty point. Completing a mill removes an opponent's cow, and a player reduced to three cows may fly to any empty point. The Morabaraba board carries diagonal lines at the corners, which the European Nine Men's Morris board does not.

— Sources

  1. Murray, H. J. R. (1952). A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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The Archive · Play as Record Morabaraba Africanpedia