Yoté

How to play Yoté

The rules

• Yoté is played in West Africa in holes scooped in the sand: five rows of six. Each player has twelve pieces, one side pebbles and the other sticks, and all of them start in the hand.
• The pebbles begin. On your turn you do one thing: place a piece from your hand in any empty hole, move a piece on the board, or jump. You never have to place every piece before you start moving; pieces kept in hand can wait for the right moment.
• A piece moves one hole forward, backward or sideways into an empty hole. Never diagonally.
• To capture, jump straight over an enemy piece next to yours into the empty hole just beyond it, and take the jumped piece off the board. Then you may also take one more enemy piece of your choice from the board.
• You win when your opponent has no pieces left, on the board or in hand. A player who can neither place nor move has also lost.

In this version

• One jump per turn, straight forward, backward or sideways.
• The extra piece comes off the board straight after the jump, and you may turn it down.
• When both players have three pieces or fewer on the board and none in hand, and forty moves pass without a capture, the game is a draw.
• The machine looks a few moves ahead and counts a piece in hand as worth almost as much as one on the board.

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