Awale

Goal of the game

Harvest more seeds than your opponent. There are 48 of them: with 25 seeds, victory is yours.

How it works

• Each player owns the row of six houses on their side; each house holds four seeds at the start.
• On your turn, take all the seeds from one of your houses and sow them one by one in the following houses, counter-clockwise.
• With 12 seeds or more, the sowing goes all the way around the board: the starting house is skipped.
• Capture: if the last seed lands in an opponent’s house that then holds 2 or 3 seeds, you harvest them, along with those of the preceding opponent houses that also hold 2 or 3 seeds, as long as the chain continues.
• Grand slam: a move that would capture all of the opponent’s seeds is still allowed, but it captures nothing.
• No starving: if the opponent has no seeds left, you must play a move that gives them some. If that is impossible, the game ends and you harvest the seeds in your row.
• If the same position occurs three times, the game ends: each player harvests the seeds in their own row.
• Keys 1 to 6: play the matching house (numbered in the direction of sowing).

About the AI

Null-window alpha-beta search with iterative deepening, a transposition table with Zobrist keys and capture-based move ordering. At Master level, it calculates around fifteen plies ahead in the middlegame and solves endgames all the way through. Lower levels reduce the depth and add less and less frequent inaccuracies.