Forty-eight seeds.
Twelve pits.

Oware is the best-known mancala game in the world and one of the oldest games still played competitively anywhere. This is the Abapa version — the one Ghanaian tournaments use — against five machines, or against another person in a live conversation where you can see them counting.

Play it now ▸ — solo against the machine for the highscore board, or 1 on 1 with somebody on the network.

Where Oware comes from

Oware is the Akan game of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and it is the most widely played member of the mancala family — a family that runs from Ethiopia to Indonesia and takes in Omweso, Bao, Congkak and several hundred others. The name is usually given as “oware”; the same game travelled with the Atlantic slave trade and is played in the Caribbean as Warri or Awari, and in Suriname as Awari.

What separates Oware from most of the family is that it is a serious competitive game with a settled tournament ruleset. The Abapa version — the one on this board — is the form used in organised play, and it is deliberately the stricter one: a grand slam is legal but forfeits its capture, and a player facing an empty enemy row is obliged to feed it. Casual house rules usually drop both, and the game gets much shallower when they do.

It is also one of the few traditional board games to have been solved. In 2003 John Romein and Henri Bal computed the full game tree from a 178-gigabyte endgame database and showed that Oware with perfect play from both sides is a draw. That is a long way beyond anything a browser can search — but it is the reason a draw against the hardest machine here is scored as a real result rather than a near miss.

How to play Oware

1. The board is two rows of six pits, four seeds in each — 48 seeds in total. The six pits nearest you are yours. Nothing ever creates or destroys a seed; the whole game is 48 seeds moving round a loop.
2. On your turn, pick one of your own pits that is not empty, lift every seed out of it, and drop them one at a time into the following pits, going anticlockwise. If your handful is big enough to go all the way round, you skip the pit you started from — it never gets refilled on the same lap.
3. You capture when your last seed lands in one of your *opponent’s* pits and brings it to exactly two or three. Take those seeds. Then look at the pit before it: if that is also an opponent pit holding two or three, take that too, and keep walking backwards until the chain breaks.
4. A move that would capture every seed your opponent has is legal, but you forfeit the capture — the seeds stay where they are. This is the grand slam rule, and it stops the game ending by ambush.
5. If your opponent’s side is empty, you must play a move that puts seeds into it. If no such move exists, the game is over and you take everything still on your own side.
6. First to 25 seeds wins, since that is more than half of 48. Twenty-four each is a draw. A position repeated three times, or a game that runs to the length limit, ends with each player taking the seeds on their own side.

What good players do

The first thing to learn is to count the circuit. Every move is fully determined once you pick the pit — there is no hidden information and no luck — so the entire skill is seeing where the last seed lands, both for your move and for every reply. A pit holding one or two seeds is one seed away from being captured, and this board draws a warning ring round every such pit for exactly that reason.

The second is that you must sow. Unlike chess you are never allowed to pass, and every legal move hands seeds to your opponent. Positions where all six of your options make things worse are completely normal, so the question is rarely “what is the best move” and much more often “which of these is the least bad”, and how to arrange the row so that you have a good one available two turns from now.

The third is accumulation. A pit with twelve or more seeds laps the whole board when it is sown, dropping a seed into every other pit — including a seed into each of your opponent’s, which can set up a chain of captures at a moment of your choosing. Building one is slow and it advertises itself, but a well-timed lap can take eight or ten seeds at once and simply end the game.

And late on, count what is left. Once fewer than a dozen seeds are in play the game becomes an exercise in starvation: you are trying to leave your opponent with nothing to move while keeping your own row alive, and the must-feed rule turns that into a genuine squeeze.

Questions

The rest of the arcade

Pong, Tetris, Chess, Draughts and Snake. All of them play the same two ways: against a machine or against a person.