Morabaraba

Morabaraba is a "mill" game played on 24 points — three nested squares joined by cross-arms, plus four corner diagonals that are the game's signature. You play the light cows; the AI plays the dark cows. Each side has 12 cows, and Light moves first.

1. Placement phase: take turns placing one cow on any empty point until all 24 cows are down.
2. Mills shoot. Whenever you complete a new mill — three of your cows in a line — you immediately remove (shoot) one opponent cow. Every mill shoots, including the very first.
3. Shooting restriction: you may not shoot a cow that is part of a completed mill — unless all of the opponent's cows are in mills, in which case any may be taken. Forming two mills at once still shoots only one cow.
4. Movement phase: once all cows are placed, slide a cow along a line to an adjacent empty point. New mill → shoot.
5. Flying: the moment you are reduced to exactly 3 cows, your cows may "fly" to any empty point, ignoring the lines. Only the 3-cow side flies.
6. Winning: reduce your opponent to 2 cows, or leave them with no legal move, and you win. If either side is down to 3 cows and 10 moves pass with no cow taken, the game is a draw.

Full rules guide & cultural history →

Morabaraba — "the mill" in Sesotho, and Mmela in Setswana — is a strategy game of the Sotho and Tswana peoples of Southern Africa. It is traditionally said to have been played by herdboys watching their families' cattle, who scratched the board into the ground and used stones as their "cows" (dikgomo) — cattle being the great measure of wealth and status across the region.

Boards worn into rock have been pointed to as evidence of the game's long history in Southern Africa, though scholars caution that such claims are contested — some carved "boards" are actually the mancala game Moruba, and a precise age is hard to pin down. What is clear is that Morabaraba has been played for generations and remains widely loved today.

In the modern era Morabaraba has been embraced as a competitive mind sport, governed in South Africa by Mind Sports South Africa (MSSA), with standardised tournament rules — the place-then-move-then-fly structure, the mill-and-shoot mechanic, and the draw rule used in this version.