• Board
• Objective
• Play

Oware is played on a special board having two rows of 6 small pits and two big pits called Storehouses.  Each player's side is the bottom row of the small pits and the player's storehouse is on the right side.

At the beginning of the game 4 seeds (or marbles) are placed in each small pit.

Players take turns sowing their seeds.  Sowing is performed in the following way:

• A player picks all seeds up from one of the pits on his side.
• Starting from the next pit in the counter-clockwise direction, the player drops one of the taken seeds in each pit (skipping the storehouses).

Below is an example of a sowing:

A player takes five seeds from his pit
and sows them counter-clockwise.

• If the last sown seed  lands in a pit on the opponent's side and brings the total number of seeds in that pit to two or three, all the seeds in that pit are captured and placed in the player's storehouse.  If the previous pit on the opponent's side (previous in the sowing direction) also has two or three seeds, those seeds are also captured and placed in the player's storehouse.  The captures are repeated until the previous pit on the opponent's side has one or more than three seeds.

A player takes five seeds from his pit and sows them
counter-clockwise.  The last sown seed lands
on the opponent's side and brings the total number
of seeds to two.  The total number of seeds
in the two previous pits is also brought
to two or three.  All seeds from these three pits
are captured and moved to the player's storehouse.

• If all the pits on the opponent's side are empty then a player must try to sow al least one seed to the opponent's side.  If it is not possible then the player moves all remaining seeds to his storehouse and the game ends.
• There is a special case (called "Grand Slam") when sowing ends up in capturing all seeds on the opponent's side.  There are several variations of the rules applying to this case:
  
  • "Grand Slam" captures are illegal, i.e. a player must not make such moves.  If all possible moves for a player result in "Grand Slams" then the player takes all remaining seeds to his storehouse and the game ends.
  • "Grand Slam" moves are allowed, however they don't capture anything.  This variation is commonly used in International competitions.
  • "Grand Slams" are allowed.  I.e. a player captures all stones from the opponent's side,  takes all remaining seeds to his storehouse and the game ends.