AYO OLOPON

OBJECTIVES OF AYO OLOPON: The main goal is to win all your opponent’s seeds. The winner is the person that has the most seeds.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2 Players

MATERIALS: An Ayo Olopon board with 48 seeds

TYPE OF GAME: Indigenous Board Game

AUDIENCE: 7+

INTRODUCTION TO AYO OLOPON

Ayo Olopon is an indigenous game widely played in the southwestern part of Nigeria (Yoruba People).

This game is also related to the oware game known widely among the Americans which was introduced to them by the slaves of “Africa”.

CONTENTS

Ayo Olopon board consists of two wooden carved boards with holes on each side of the board and forty-eight seeds (called “ayo seeds”),  with four seeds in each hole for a start.

SETUP

The two players take their side of the board and fill each of their six holes with four ayo seeds.

The two players take turns in an anti-clockwise run.

HOW TO PLAY

The players start by choosing each side of the board,  the game can begin with any of the players.

The first player picks all the seeds from any of the six holes on their side of the board and runs them through the holes in an anti-clockwise run, thereby it can run through the opponent’s holes, that’s the main aim of the game.

This is repeated continuously until one of the players has no more seeds to run.

The players can’t move seeds from their opponent’s side unless they win seeds from their holes.

WINNING SEEDS

A player can win or move seeds either from their side of the hole or the opponent’s side when the last seed while running (passing the seeds through the holes) falls into a hole that contains one or two seeds, which makes the total number of the seeds in the hole two or three, so the player can move the all the seeds in the hole.

Note: If the seeds in the hole that follows the winning hole also sum up to two, the seeds will be moved by the player.

WINNING 

A winner is declared when one player does not have any seeds to run through the holes again, and if it is also not possible for the opponent seeds to run through his hole during the next move.

Nakoa Davis
Latest posts by Nakoa Davis (see all)
×