Three seeds a pit
Thirty-six seeds, short games, and mistakes that punish you at once.
Three seeds a pit means thirty-six on the board, so nineteen wins and eighteen each is a draw. Games are much shorter and there is little to hide behind.
Rows empty out early, which means empty pits, which means captures are on offer from the first few turns rather than building slowly. A single miscount can hand over a third of the seeds you were counting on.
The free move sits further along your row here, since three seeds carry A4 to your store. Because the board thins so fast, the final sweep often decides it, and a couple of seeds kept in reserve near your store are worth more than usual. The pie rule applies.
Kalah: Rules
Kalah is the tidiest game in the sowing family, which is why most people meet it first. Two rows of six pits, a store at each end, and one question: where do the forty-eight seeds finish? What follows is exactly what this site plays.
The board and the goal
Two rows of six pits with a larger store at each end. You have the near row, the south side, A1 to A6 from your left, and the store at your right-hand end. Your opponent has the far row, the north side, B1 to B6. Every pit starts with four seeds, so forty-eight are in play.
Seeds never leave the board; they only travel towards one store or the other. Twenty-five seeds wins, because your opponent can no longer catch you. Twenty-four each is a draw.
Sowing, one seed at a time
Choose any pit on your own row that has seeds in it, lift all of them, and drop them one at a time into the pits that follow, going counter-clockwise. After A6 comes your own store, then B1 through B6, then round to A1 again.
Your store is a place to sow into. Your opponent's is not, so you step straight over it. Nothing else is skipped, and a full pit will sow all the way round and drop a seed back into the pit you emptied. Count the slots on your fingers before you lift, because where the last seed lands is the whole game.
The free move
If your last seed falls into your own store, your turn is not over and you move again. There is no limit, so one turn can be a run of several moves. Look for a pit whose seed count is exactly its distance to your store: in the four-seed game, A3 does it on move one.
The capture
If your last seed drops into a pit on your own side that was empty before it arrived, you capture. Take that seed together with everything in the pit directly opposite, and put the lot in your store. Opposite means straight across the board: A1 faces B6, A2 faces B5, and so on.
One detail catches people out. Here the capture only happens when the pit opposite actually holds seeds. Land in an empty pit facing an empty pit and nothing is taken; your seed just sits there. The other way of playing it, where the lone seed goes to your store anyway, is the empty-capture rule, and it is switched off by default.
How the game ends
The game ends the moment a player is due to move and their whole row is empty. Play simply stops, and the other player sweeps every seed still on their own side into their own store.
Then count. More seeds wins and twenty-four each is a draw. The game also stops early once a store passes half the seeds, since the result can no longer change. So late on, never empty your own row while your opponent is sitting on a fat one.
The pie rule
Kalah on six pits with four seeds each has been worked right through by computer, and the player who moves first can force a win. That would make the coin flip matter more than the play, which is no good for a rated game.
So the opener takes their first turn, free moves included, and then the second player chooses: keep their seat, or swap and take over the position handed to them. The choice is made once. It pushes the opener towards a modest first move rather than a crushing one, since a crushing one will simply be taken off them. All three Kalah variants here use the pie rule.
Reading the notation
A move is written as the pit you emptied: A4, B2. An x with a number, such as x7, gives the seeds captured on that move; a plus means it ended in your store and you went again; a hash means the move finished the game. So A3+ is the standard free opening, and B5x9# is a nine-seed capture that ended the match.