African Board Masters

Francis Irele

In-app purchases

About this game

Ayo, Dara and Morabaraba three traditional African board games, rebuilt properly.

Not three skins on one game. Three separate rule engines, each written from the rules as they are actually played, each with its own board, pieces and opponent.

AYO (AYOAYO)
Two rows of six pits, four seeds in each. Sow around the board, capture in fours, and take more than half the seeds to win. The rules most versions leave out are in here: you must feed an opponent who has nothing to sow, and a move that would take every seed your opponent owns takes nothing at all.

DARA
Five rows of six points, twelve stones each. Place, then move, and line up three to take a stone. Two rules shape everything: you may not complete a line while you are still placing, and four in a row is never allowed. Get the placement phase wrong and the movement phase is already lost.

MORABARABA
The South African cow board, played on three nested squares. Place twelve cows each, then slide along the lines. Three on a line shoots one of the opponent's cows. Down to exactly three and yours learn to fly they move to any empty point, not just the next one. When both players are down to three, nothing is protected any more.

A REAL OPPONENT
Each game has its own search engine, tuned separately. Difficulty changes how often the opponent makes a mistake, not how long it pretends to think. Three tiers in every game, with a fourth — Expert — in Ayo, where deeper search is measured to make it genuinely stronger. The Adaptive opponent watches how you play and moves up a tier once you beat it twice.

THE RULES, EXPLAINED
How to play is a real tutorial, not a wall of text: it steps through the opening, shows the moves that matter and explains why. Every game also has a tutorial that takes a real position, plays the best move and tells you what it saw.

BUILT FOR A PHONE
Portrait, one hand, one board. The boards are drawn on the device rather than shipped as pictures, so they are sharp at any size, and the sound is synthesised rather than sampled. Five themes, from dark hardwood to Brass Noir.

NO ADVERTS. NO ACCOUNT. NO TRACKING.
No ad SDK, no banner, no interstitial, no rewarded video. Nothing in the app exists to serve an advert.

There is no sign-in and no account. The app does not ask Android for the INTERNET permission at all, so it has no way to send anything anywhere even if it wanted to. Your record games played, wins by difficulty, best runs, achievements is stored on your phone and stays there. Uninstalling deletes it, and we cannot restore it, because we never had it.

It plays with the signal off: on a plane, on the underground, anywhere. Buying a subscription needs the store, and therefore a signal, once — after that the app never needs the network again.

FREE TO PLAY, AND NO ADVERTS AT ALL
All three games, every rule, every tier, the Adaptive opponent, all five themes, the tutorial, the move explanations and every achievement are free.

Three new games start free in any rolling twenty-four hours. That is the only limit in the app, and the subscription is the only thing that removes it. It is deliberately generous in the two places it could bite: the guided first game is never counted, and neither is a rematch on a score you are already keeping. The count is about starting something new, not about playing on — nothing interrupts a game in progress to ask you for money.

UNLIMITED, IF YOU WANT IT
One subscription removes the daily limit: as many new games as you like, everything else unchanged. Monthly or yearly, renewing automatically until you cancel. Cancelling returns you to three games a day and takes nothing away from anything you have earned. There is no one-off or lifetime purchase, and there never will be.

Available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese.

African Board Masters is made by Loadcircle Ltd.

What’s new

Fixed: the hint card no longer covers the board. Removed a message about JavaScript.