Oware

The same game carries a different name in almost every market, and the app uses your country's:

• Gebeta — Ethiopia
• Ayo — Nigeria
• Bao — Tanzania
• Omweso — Uganda
• Igisoro — Rwanda
• Songo — Cameroon
• Awalé — Côte d'Ivoire
• Nsolo — Zambia

Mancala is not one game but a family of them, played across Africa for well over a thousand years under a different name in almost every country. The board is two rows of six pits, and the pieces are seeds.

Lottra implements the Abapa rules of Oware, the variant most often played competitively. If you grew up playing Gebeta, Ayo, Bao or Omweso, the rhythm will be familiar even where a detail differs.

It is the only game on Lottra where skill decides the outcome. There are no dice and no hidden cards — both players see everything, like chess.

1. You own the six pits on your side. Each starts with four seeds.
2. Tap one of your pits to pick up all its seeds and drop them one at a time into the following pits, going anticlockwise.
3. If your last seed lands in an opponent's pit and makes it hold exactly two or three seeds, you capture them.
4. Captures chain backwards: if the pit before it also now holds two or three, you take that too, and so on.
5. The game ends when someone has captured more than half the seeds on the board.

Board

2 × 6 pits, 48 seeds

Rules

Oware, Abapa variant

Opponent

Computer

Decided by

Skill

Daily limit

10 matches

You must feed your opponent. If your opponent has no seeds at all, your move has to give them one. If no move can, the game ends and you collect the remaining seeds. New players lose winning positions by starving an opponent and handing over the board.

The grand slam is not allowed. A move that would capture every seed your opponent has is legal to play, but you take nothing for it. The rule exists so the game cannot be ended by a single sweep.

Beyond those: count before you sow. The board is fully visible, so a capture is never a surprise — it is something you either saw or did not. Watch for pits building towards one or two seeds, because those are the ones about to become capturable, and think about where the last seed of your move actually lands rather than how many you are moving.

Because this is skill rather than chance, there is no fixed return here — a careless player loses steadily and a strong player can beat the bot consistently. It is capped at a small stake and ten matches a day for exactly that reason.

Every random result is sealed before you choose and published afterwards, so it can be checked rather than trusted — see provably fair.

The button below opens Lottra in Telegram and goes straight to this game.

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