Twelve pits, forty-eight seeds, two people. You sow your seeds around the board and capture the pits you bring to two or three. It takes five minutes to learn and you will still be losing to your uncle in ten years.
The same rules as the ones written below. No account, and nothing is kept.
Four seeds in every pit. The bottom row is yours.
Two rows of six pits, four seeds in each. The row nearest you is yours. Nobody owns the seeds, only a row.
On your turn, lift every seed out of one pit on your row and drop them one at a time into the pits that follow, counterclockwise: along your row to the right, then back along your opponent's.
A pit holding twelve seeds or more laps the board. Skip the pit you lifted them from, so it is left empty.
If your last seed lands in a pit on your opponent's row and brings it to exactly two or three, those seeds are yours. Then look at the pit before it. If that one is on their row and also holds two or three, take it too, and keep walking back until you reach one that doesn't.
A capture that would leave your opponent with no seeds at all does not count. The seeds stay where you sowed them and nothing is taken.
If your opponent's row is empty, you have to play a pit that puts seeds on it.
The first player to capture 25 seeds wins on the spot. If the player to move has no legal move, the game stops and each player keeps the seeds on their own row: most seeds wins, and 24 each is a draw. A game that reaches 200 moves ends the same way.
Ayo is what the Yoruba call it. In Ghana the same board is Oware. It is one of the sowing games that get filed together as mancala, and it needs nothing but two rows of hollows and forty-eight small things to count.
It is not played the same way in every house. If your family plays it differently from the rules above, your family is not wrong. These are the ones our tables use, so that two people who have never met can sit down and agree.
Ayo is one of the games in the Arcade.