My board, from Cameroon. On this board players would sit left and right. The pieces are seeds.
I have an Android implementation of this ancient game. The link
will download and offer to install it. Because it is not (yet) on the Play Store,
you will have to enable ‘unapproved’ software installations.
Owari is a bead game played all across Africa. It has many spellings,
more common variants being Awale, and Warri. It is from the Mancala
class of games, which are count and capture bead games, with many
different variations of rules. This variant is the one played by the
old men in market places in Lome, Ghana, and other parts of West
Africa. It is rumoured that it was to be played by kings to prove their
strategic skills on accession to the throne in Ghana.
Here I set about learning the bead game played all across Africa from
east to west - played with a 12 hole board and 48 beads. It is called
various names, the most common being Owali or Owari. There are a number
of different ways of playing, all of which involve the following :- you
have six houses, your opponent has six. You pick up the beads from a
house of your choosing (it must be one of yours) and deposit them one
by one anti- clockwise around the board, and examine the house where
the last bead falls. Depending on the number now in this house, there
are different courses of action.
