Three games built out of Ghanaian tradition rather than borrowed from anyone. Oware has been played across West Africa for centuries, the Adinkra symbols are older than the printing press, and the proverbs came down by mouth. No accounts, no adverts, nothing to install, and nothing here a child should not see.
The counting game of the Akan. Forty-eight seeds, twelve pits, and one rule that decides everything: you sow into your opponent's row, and if your last seed leaves a pit holding two or three, you take it. First to twenty-five wins.
Your move. Pick any pit on your side that has seeds in it.
Take all the seeds from one of your pits and drop them one at a time into each pit going anticlockwise. If you had enough seeds to come all the way round, you skip the pit you started from. If your last seed falls in your opponent's row and leaves that pit with exactly two or three seeds, you capture them — and you keep capturing backwards along their row for as long as the pits before it also hold two or three. You may never leave your opponent with nothing to play; if your move would starve them, you must make a different one.
Turn over two tiles. Match a pair and the symbol keeps its place — and tells you what it means. The Adinkra are Akan symbols, each one standing in for a proverb or an idea, and they were being stamped onto cloth long before anyone here was writing news.
The words are in the wrong order. Click them to build the proverb back up, in order. Get it right and you find out what it was for — because in Akan a proverb is rarely about what it appears to be about.
Why these three. Every one of them is either traditional and unowned, or written here. Oware is a folk game of the Akan with no proprietor. The Adinkra symbols are traditional Akan iconography; the drawings on this page are our own stylised renderings, not copies of anyone's artwork. The proverbs are oral tradition, and the readings beneath them were written for this page. Nothing was lifted, so nothing can be taken down — and there is no advertising, no tracking, and no account for a child to make.