Yoté

Yoté is played on a 5×6 grid. Each player starts with 12 pieces in hand and an empty board. You play the lighter pieces; the AI plays the darker ones.

1. Drop or move: on your turn, either place a new piece from your hand onto any empty square, or move one of your pieces one step orthogonally (up, down, left, or right) into an empty square.
2. Capture: jump straight over an adjacent enemy piece into the empty square just beyond it. The jumped piece is removed.
3. Capture-two: every capture also lets you remove one more enemy piece from anywhere on the board — a single jump can take two pieces.
4. You don't have to put all your pieces out at once — holding pieces in hand to drop them at the right moment is part of the strategy.
5. Reduce your opponent to fewer than three pieces (or leave them with no legal move) to win.

Full rules guide & cultural history →

Yoté is one of the most widely played traditional games of West Africa, especially in Senegal, Mali, the Gambia, and across the Sahel. It is traditionally a game of the ground: players scoop two rows of shallow holes into the sand and play with pebbles, seeds, or pieces of broken pottery — whatever is at hand. Because it needs no board to buy and no fixed equipment, Yoté is a game of everyday life, played in courtyards, markets, and the shade of trees.

What gives Yoté its distinctive bite is the "capture-two" rule: every successful jump removes the jumped piece and a second enemy piece chosen from anywhere on the board. This turns a single tactical strike into a potentially game-deciding swing, and it makes the decision of when to commit pieces from your hand a constant source of tension and bluff.

Like many African capture and mancala games, Yoté rewards patience, misdirection, and reading your opponent. Skilled players are known for holding pieces in reserve and provoking an overextension before springing a double capture that collapses the enemy position.