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West Africa

Whot

also called Whot!

Whot is a shedding game played with a distinctive deck of five shapes — circle, triangle, cross, square and star — plus twenty wild cards. It is among the most widely played games in Nigerian homes, with local rule variations that are argued over as vigorously as the games themselves.

Played in: Nigeria · Ghana

— 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

Scores the cards in its own hand by hand-written preferences. It cannot see your cards.

Scores each move once, no lookahead whot-engine.ts — aiChooseCard()

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.

No search and no lookahead. It scores each playable card in its hand against a list someone wrote by hand: +40 for a draw-3, +30 for a draw-2, +25 for a skip, +20 for a go-again, +5 for matching the current shape. Does it cheat? No. It reads how many cards you are holding — which you can see too at a real table — and if you are down to three or fewer it adds 30 to any card that would skip you or make you draw. It never reads which cards you hold. On medium it takes its best-scoring card only 60% of the time and otherwise plays at random, which is how this game manufactures a middle difficulty: not by thinking less well, but by sometimes not thinking at all.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

One common rule set is implemented. Household variants differ substantially over which numbers carry which command, whether commands stack, and what happens when the market runs dry; none of that variation is represented here. The name Whot! is a commercial trademark of the published Nigerian deck — this entry documents the game as played, and is not affiliated with the publisher.

— How it is played

Players match the card on the pile by shape or by number, or play a Whot card and name the shape to follow. Certain numbers carry commands — hold on, pick two, general market, suspension — and the first player to shed their hand wins.

— Sources

No sources have been attached to this entry yet. Until they are, treat everything above as provisional.

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