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West Africa · Akan

Oware

also called Awari · Ayo · Awale · Warri

Oware is a two-row sowing game of the mancala family, played on twelve pits with forty-eight seeds. Players lift the contents of a pit and drop them one by one into the pits that follow, and the game turns on counting far enough ahead to see where the last seed will fall. It travelled with enslaved West Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, where it is still played under other names.

Played in: Ghana · Côte d'Ivoire · Nigeria · Benin · Togo

— 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

Looks four moves ahead and picks the line that ends best for it.

Searches the game tree 4 moves ahead mancala-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.

On its hardest setting this is a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, four plies deep. It plays out every legal move, then your best replies to each, and so on, and scores the positions at the bottom. That scoring function is where the opinions live. It reads: 10 x (its captured seeds - yours) 2 x (its seeds on the board - yours) 1 for each of your pits holding one or two seeds Someone decided a captured seed is worth five times a seed still in play, and that your thin pits are worth steering towards because they are the ones that become capturable. Those weights are an argument about how Oware works, written as numbers. Change them and you change the machine's idea of good play. Alpha-beta pruning means it stops examining a line once it knows that line cannot beat one it has already found. Turn on 'show the search' and watch the position count: it examines far fewer than the full tree. On medium it does not search at all — it takes the largest immediate capture. On easy it picks a legal move uniformly at random.

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What this version is not

The twelve pits, the anticlockwise sowing, the capture on bringing an opponent's pit to two or three seeds, the backwards chain through preceding pits, the obligation to feed a starving opponent and the forfeit of a grand-slam capture are all implemented. The two bowls beside the board hold captured seeds and are not sown into.

What is missing: there is no repetition or cycle detection, and Oware positions can in principle loop forever. The computer opponent searches four moves ahead at its hardest setting, which is far short of a strong player. Regional conventions differ over the grand slam — some traditions forbid the move outright rather than allowing it without capture, as here.

— How it is played

Each of the twelve pits begins with four seeds. On your turn you empty one of the six pits on your side and sow its seeds one per pit, moving anticlockwise. In the standard Oware capture, if your last seed lands in an opponent's pit and brings that pit to two or three seeds, you take them, and you continue taking backwards from any immediately preceding opponent pits also holding two or three. The game ends when a player has captured more than half the seeds.

— Sources

  1. Murray, H. J. R. (1952). A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  2. Russ, L. (2000). The Complete Mancala Games Book. New York: Marlowe & Company.

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