Awale

Awale is a Macintosh implementation of one of Africa's oldest board games, a member of the wider Mancala family also known as Awele, Wari, and Oware. Published by Myriad Software (Didier and Olivier Guillion) and reaching version 2.2.2c in the late 1990s, it lets players face the computer or a human across thirteen pre-defined regional rule sets.

The game

Awale is a stones-and-pits sowing game whose rules are simple but whose strategy runs deep. Myriad's release frames it as "a very realistic game, with solid wood and clattering stones" and ships thirteen rule variants sourced from traditions across Africa and beyond, so players can pick the regional flavor they want to study.

Players and modes

You can take on the built-in AI or play head-to-head against a second human on the same Mac. The Macintosh build was released alongside Win32 and Windows versions and is bilingual, with English and French interfaces.

Heritage and naming

The submission notes recall the Masai legend that the game was invented by Sindillo, son of Maitoumbe "the first man," and originally called geshe. The keywords list ("AWALE AWELE MANCALA WARI AFRICAN STONE GAME") is itself a small primer in how widely the game travels under different names.

Distribution

Version 2.2.2c was distributed through Info-Mac as awale-222c.hqx (about 971 KB) and mirrored from Myriad's own pages at wwwperso.hol.fr/~myriad/awale.htm and members.aol.com/GBShare/awale.htm. Contact for the shareware release went to myriad@hol.fr.