Mū Tōrere

Mū tōrere is played on an eight-pointed star — eight outer arms (the kewai) around a single centre point (the pūtahi). You play the four black pieces; the AI plays the four white. The four black pieces start on one half of the star and the four white on the other, with the centre empty. Black moves first.

1. A move slides one piece to an empty point that is directly connected to it: along the ring to an adjacent arm, into the empty centre, or from the centre out to any empty arm. There is no capturing.
2. The centre rule: you may only move a piece into the centre if one of its two arm-neighbours holds an opponent's piece. This famous restriction is the heart of the game.
3. Winning: you win by leaving your opponent with no legal move — every one of their pieces blocked. The player who cannot move loses.
4. Draws: mathematically the game is solved — with perfect play it is a draw. If the position simply repeats or drags on without a trap, the game is scored a draw. Pick a difficulty that suits you: Easy is beatable, Hard plays near-perfectly.

Full rules guide & cultural history →

Mū tōrere is one of the very few board games the Māori are documented to have played before European contact. It is associated especially with the Ngāti Porou of the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand, who are recorded playing it on a slab of wood, a piece of bark, or simply marks drawn in the earth, using pebbles or beans as pieces.

The board is an eight-pointed star: the eight outer arms are the kewai and the central point is the pūtahi. The rules used here are a standard reconstruction — the early written sources (such as Elsdon Best and, later, the mathematician Marcia Ascher) diverge on small points, especially exactly when the centre-entry restriction applies, so no single fixed canon should be asserted. The version here applies the centre rule throughout, which keeps the game sharp.

Deceptively simple, Mū tōrere is mathematically solved: with perfect play by both sides it is a draw. A recorded anecdote has the Ngāti Hauā chief Wiremu Tāmihana offering to play Governor George Grey for the stakes of the country — an offer Grey is said to have declined.