Free Awale

Free Awale is a mancala game in the Ivory Coast variant, Awalé. It involves capturing stones and is now available as a free software. The game can be freely downloaded, used, modified, and redistributed under the GNU general public licence. The rules of Ivory Coast Awale game consists of two lines of six holes with each player playing a single line.4 stones are present in every hole at the start of the game. One plays alternately and cannot pass their turn or play two turns. The stones of the arrival hole are eaten when the arrival hole lies in the opponent line and contains two or three stones. The winner is the player who has eaten the most stones.

West Africa plays various rules as a variant of the original game. The first variant is concerned with the maximum number of holes that can be eaten. Another variant is that when you are in position to eat more than four holes and you play it, you eat nothing at all. In this implementation of the game, the maximum number of holes to be eaten is four, and when more than four holes are eatable, you eat the last four holes. An additional rule is that the winner lets the last stone of the game go to its challenger, but it is not implemented in free awale.

The game is based on a rapid assessment of the position and on memory rather than long thought. This enables a typical game to last for about ten minutes. The game has a requirement of Tcl/Tk. The updates in the new release feature the ability to configure the rule to match other standard rules. The language is included for permanent save, and cyclic end game is also implemented.