Awale In my last entry I promised to wirte about Awale, an ancestral game that has been played for centuries. It's a board game for two players. I'll start by explaining the board: The board is a wooden surface with twelve holes, six on each side of the board. There are forty eight seeds (actually in modern boards they are rounded stones or marbles) which are placed in groups of four pieces in each hole. That way at the start of the game each player has all of his/her holes with four seeds each. Who is making the first move is decided randomly. The objective of the game is to capture twenty five seeds or to force the opponent to resign. Each player makes only one move each turn. In order to do a move, each player takes all the seeds in one of his/her holes and starting on the hole to the right, he/she drops a single seed in each hole until all seeds have been placed. This move, which I'll call "seeding" from now on, must be done counter-clockwise. If there are enough seeds to make a complete loop across the board, the starting hole is skip. If the final hole reached in a seeding move ends with two or three pieces, those pieces are captured. If the preceding hole, the one before the hole where a capture has taken place, contains two or three pieces as well, those pieces are also captured. This process continues until a hole which does not contain two or three pieces is reached. A capture can only be done (made??) in one of the opponent's holes. The capture rule has an exception though: if at the end of the capture procedure there are no seeds on the opponent's field (this is his/her six holes) the capture cannot be done. This is called the "feed the starving one" rule. Also if at any time your opponent runs out of seeds you must make a move which places at least one seed in his/her field. This game hasn't been solved by computers so far. It can be as hard as chess! Thanks for reading.