This book is intended to be much more than the usual manual for using the computer to play a game. Of course, we do give the rules of the game oware (wari) following the standard Asante set given by Bennett (see Appendix seven) and recapitulated, in essence, by Herskovits, Murray, Sawyer and Adler. We also provide detailed instruction on how to use all the facilities of the computer program, which should serve to enrich the pleasures of learning, playing and mastering the game.
In addition, it is our hope that this book will become the definitive source text on the game and its history and cultural significance, containing, as it does, all the important documents by modern historians and anthropologists. Our researches have found all other writing on the subject to be either properly referenced and subsumed in our source documents, or to be recapitulation, up to plagiarism, of material from our sources, or insignificant, being no more than the specification of the rules of play and tips on tactics in one variant or another.
Our account of the trail leading to all these documents and the excitement we experienced in finding them should help to bring everything into perspective and give the reader some impression of the power available in conducting such research, thanks to modern technology, such as the Internet, and the collaborating institutions in the InterLibrary Loan Service.
We also have a very brief discussion of the programming techniques employed in the computer version and a little food for thought on the nature of machine "intelligence." It is hoped that this will inspire interest in programming in the serious sense, amplifying our intellects, as Fano said, just as mechanical devices magnified our muscles.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements i
Preface iii
How to Install Oware! iii
A Note to Parents and Teachers iii
About This Book iv
How to Play Oware 1
How to Play Oware! 4
The Screen Layout 4
Playing the Game 10
What the Menus Offer 12
Controlling Play 18
The Name of the Game 23
Changing Names 30
What Makes Oware! So Smart? 32
Strategy and Tactics 35
Offensive Tactics 35
Defensive Tactics 40
Principles of Play: Strategy 42
An Example Game 48
Appendices 54
One - The Starting Point (Adler) 55 {See Note 1 Below}
Two - Before the Starting Point (Sawyer) 59 {Note 2}
Three - The Main Source (Murray) 64 {Note 3}
Four - The First Anthropologist (Culin) 91 {Note 4}
Five - The Second Anthropologist (Herskovits) 111 {Note 5}
Six - Wari in the New World (Herskovits) 121 {Note 6}
Seven - The Best Rule Set (Bennett) 148 {Note 7}
Biographies 160
Dr. Irving Adler 161
Stewart Culin 161
Melville J. Herskovits 165
H. J. R. Murray 173
W. W. Sawyer 174
References and Further Reading 175
Index 180
Note 1: The passage from Adler's Magic House of Numbers (1957)
describing the game.
Note 2: A note from Sawyer, who was teaching at University College, Achimota, the Gold Coast (Ghana), to the Mathematical Recreations feature in Scripta Mathematica XV, 1949
Note 3: The entire introduction on Mancala Games and much of the section on Mancala II games of the Oware type from Murray's classic, The History of Board Games Other than Chess 1952
Note 4: Published 100 years ago, the "field work" was done at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair! One of the first attempts to portray the whole gamut of Mancala games. Culin was also the first to use games as a cultural marker which Herskovits further developed.
Note 5: Herskovits' paper titled Adji-boto. Herskovits may well be the greatest student of African and African-American culture in the U. S. He certainly was among the earliest. In 1928 he went to the village of Beidotti on the upper Suriname River in Dutch Guiana to study the Saramaccaner tribe. These are one of the groups of Africans who escaped from their captors and established a new society based on their ancestral cultures in the South American bush. He notes that adji-boto resembles a game played in Dahomey and the game played by the people on the Guiana coast, awari, resembles the Ashanti game wari (oware).
Note 6: Herskovits went back to Dutch Guiana to study the Djukas at Paramaribo on the coast. He then tracked the Ashanti game all across the Caribbean, noting the local variations on the rules and the different cultural uses made of the game. A fascinating paper which reads rather like a detective story.
Note 7: Captain Robert S. Rattray was an anthropologically trained
colonial administrator in the Gold Coast in the early part of this century.
In 1928 he published Religion and Art in Ashanti which includes
this chapter, Wari, by Dr. G. T. Bennett. It contains the earliest
and best description of the rules, strategy and tactics in English. The
Ashanti rules are used by OWARE!