What is Oware! ?

OWARE!tm is Sapient Software's computer program to play Oware (Wari). It has many features to enhance your playing pleasure and understanding of the game. It is designed for both children and adults. For children, it has bright, colorful and orderly displays, understandable action and simple operation. For adults, it provides challenging levels of opposition which take skill, consideration and foresight to overcome.

OWARE!tm is also a book about the game. The book provides the usual instructions in playing the game and using the computer program. It also provides a source-book on the game's unusual history and cultural significance. Included are articles by important anthropologists and game historians going back a century which have been lost or overlooked in recent times. Ancestral forms of the game go back to the New Kingdom in Egypt, about 1500 bc, and it and related games are played wherever there are people of African ancestry or where the Islamic faith is prominent.

What you need to play Oware!:

A PC, that is, an IBM or compatible type of personal computer; 640 KB of RAM; an EGA or better screen; DOS 3.3 or later. A mouse is not required, the game can be played using only the keyboard, but it is very desirable, especially for young children. A hard disk is preferable but the game may be played from a floppy disk (make a copy - Oware! will write to the disk). If you want to print recorded games, then, obviously, you will need a printer. Any kind of printer will do. If your CPU is less powerful than a "486/33" you may find Oware!'s rate of play to be rather slow.

Oware! is a DOS based program. Many users of Windows do not have the DOS required mouse driver active in their systems. To make the mouse work you must either have a line in your autoexec.bat file that says "mouse" (without the quotes), or, if you are using a memory manager such as QEMM or 386MAX, a line which loads mouse.com according to their rules. Less preferably, instead of loading mouse.com in your autoexec.bat you can have this line in your config.sys file: device=mouse.sys.

(from the Preface to the book of Oware!)

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