Basic rules
The rules are based on the rules of Ivory Coast called "Abapa" which seem to be the most used. Options will allow you to adapt these rules if you are used to playing with slightly different rules.
The game is played by 2 players with a board containing 2 rows of 6 squares (or holes), each square having 4 seeds at the start.
The players are facing each other, with a row in front of each player. This row will be his camp. A rotation direction is defined and we choose the player who will start the game.
The goal of the game is to have collected the most seeds at the end of the game. The winner is the one who has the most seeds, but there can be a draw if the players have as many seeds.
The players play in turns. A turn is played as follows: the player takes all the seeds from one of the squares in his camp then he spreads them in all the squares that follow on his row then on that of his opponent following the agreed direction of rotation (one seed in each square after the one where he collected the seeds).
If his last seed falls in a square in the opponent's camp and there are now two or three seeds in this square, the player collects these two or three seeds. Then he looks at the previous square: if it is in the opponent's camp and contains two or three seeds, he collects these seeds, and so on until he arrives at his camp or until there is a number of seeds other than two or three.
We do not skip a square when we spread except when we have twelve seeds or more, that is to say we make a complete turn: we do not fill the square from which we have just taken the seeds.
You must "feed" your opponent, that is to say, when he has no more seeds, you absolutely must play a stroke that allows him to play again. If this is not possible, the opponent is said to be starving, the game ends and the player who was going to play captures the remaining seeds
If a stroke were to take all of the opponent's seeds, then the move can be played, but no capture is made: you must not "starve" your opponent.
The game ends when a player is starving, he has no more seeds and his opponent cannot provide him with any. However, this situation can sometimes require a very large number of moves and even never happen, and the game becomes uninteresting when there are only a few seeds left in the game.
Players can agree to stop the game when it becomes uninteresting or define criteria for stopping the game (see the end of the game).
Seed Count
Visually inspecting the squares allows you to know the number of seeds in the squares when there are not too many (less than half a dozen), but when there are many, only the memory of what was distributed allows you to know it. If a player has forgotten the count of one of his squares, he has the possibility of counting the seeds, but he cannot do so for his opponent's squares.
Adapting the rules
Players who are used to using slightly different rules can modify some of these rules by options in the preferences screen:
you can limit the number of squares where you can collect seeds during a move (from 1 to 6 - with 6 this is equivalent to no limit),
the number of squares where you can collect is limited and there are more collectible squares than the limit, you can choose between only collecting the last ones and not collecting anything,
can choose to collect only if there are 2 seeds in the square and not when there are 3 seeds,
you can choose an initial number of seeds different from 4 in each square (between 1 and 8).
You can also save several sets of options and choose one at the beginning of a game