Oware

An Akan game

The game belongs to the Akan-speaking peoples of what is now Ghana and eastern Côte d'Ivoire, played on carved wooden boards, on folding boards with a lid, and just as often in two rows of hollows scraped in the ground. Related names for closely related games appear all along the coast and inland.

How far back it goes is not something anyone can pin down. Two rows of pits and a handful of seeds leave almost no archaeological trace, and written descriptions only begin with outsiders who arrived late. The game is clearly old and locally developed, and precise dates are guesses.

What the game is for

Oware has never been only a pastime. It is played at funerals and gatherings, used to pass hours in company, and treated as a way of showing patience and judgement in public. A well-carved board is an object with real standing.

That setting shapes the rules. The strong feeling that wiping out an opponent's seeds in one move is not the done thing comes from the plain fact that oware is played between people who will sit down together again tomorrow.

Across West Africa and over the Atlantic

Games with the same two-row layout and the same capture on two or three run right across West Africa under many names, and no two towns need agree on the details. Through the Atlantic slave trade the game also crossed to the Caribbean and parts of South America, and it has been played for centuries in Antigua, Barbados, the Virgin Islands and Suriname among others.

That crossing is one of the clearest cases anywhere of a board game carried by people who had everything else taken from them. The island forms have their own names and their own rules, and in several places the game has been consciously revived as a link back to West Africa.

Writing the tournament rules down

For most of its life oware needed no written rules, because both players had learned from the same neighbours. Competitive play between strangers changes that, and in the second half of the twentieth century the version known as abapa was set out as the serious game rather than the teaching one.

Abapa is what this site treats as standard: the feeding obligation, the capture chain running backwards through pits of two or three, and a grand slam that may be played but pays nothing. Organisations promoting the game internationally have published rules along these lines, and most online play follows them.

One name, many games

It is worth being blunt about the variation. Rules that capture on two only, or on two, three and four, that allow or forbid sowing which ends on your own side, that require feeding or do not, that play one game or a series of rounds, all exist and all have people who consider theirs the correct game.

None of them is wrong. This site plays one clearly defined version so that two strangers can sit down with the same expectations, and offers the grand-slam alternatives because that is the rule players argue about most.

Mehloli

• H. J. R. Murray, *A History of Board Games Other Than Chess* (1952) — the early survey that set the West African games in a wider frame.
• Philip Townshend, *Mankala in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Distributional Analysis* (1979) — useful on how unevenly rule sets are spread.
• Jean Retschitzki, *Stratégies des joueurs d'awélé* (1990) — a study of how skilled West African players actually think.
• Alex de Voogt, *Mancala Board Games* (1997) — a concise account of the family, its spread and its social settings.
• Laurence Russ, *The Complete Mancala Games Book* (2000) — a large collection of regional rule sets, including several oware relatives.
• The Oware Society, published tournament rules for abapa (1990s) — the modern codification most competitive play follows.