The Archive · Play as Record
The Games
8 heritage entries · 17 original games · 25 playable in the browser
What is playing against you? — every opponent, explained →
A board scratched into dirt, twelve pits and forty-eight seeds, two people who will not speak for an hour: this is a document. Games are among the oldest things Africa has kept, and unlike a mask or a manuscript they survive only by being played. An archive that describes them without letting you play them has kept the husk and lost the thing.
Each entry records what is known about a game — where it is played, by whom, under which name — and, where a board can be rendered honestly, lets you play it against the machine. Every playable version carries a note saying plainly what it simplifies. None of them is the real thing; all of them are a way in.
Part One
Games people play
Boards and card games with a history: played on the ground, on carved wood, on folded card, in some cases for centuries. Each entry records what is known and, where the board can be rendered honestly, lets you play it.
Part Two
Play & Learn
Original games on African subjects — invented here, not recorded from anywhere. Several borrow something real: an instrument, a trade route, a migration. Each says on its own page which parts are real and which are made up. They are a way in, not a source.
— The workshops
Games are still being made on the continent, and the studios making them belong in this record as surely as the boards do. The archive documents them and sends you to their work; it does not reproduce it.