One Africa, Many Countries – Ayo

Opening Discussion

Read the Ayo Story from this curriculum to your students. Then, brainstorm a list with your students of their favorite games (Go Fish, Monopoly, etc.). Write the list on the board or on a piece of chart paper. Ask them if they think that kids from other countries play the same games or different ones. There is a good chance that Mancala will make the list — lots of children play it. Tell your students that they will be making their own games like Mancala and will play with their classmates.

The Challenge

Make and play your own Nigerian board game!

Doing the Activity

1. Divide your students into teams of 2 for this activity.
2. Each team will need 1 egg carton, 2 cups and 48 seeds/beans. Have the students count the seeds out rather than you doing it yourself — this will save you time and will give kids practice counting.
3. Students should use scissors to cut the top off of the egg carton, leaving the part that the eggs would rest in. Students can use cups or the top of the egg carton cut in half (one half for each player) to store the beans that they capture during the game. Sitting across from each other, teammates should place 4 seeds in each empty hole of the egg carton.  Each of those compartments is called a “house”. The set up should look like this (See Figure 1).

Teach teams how to play following the instructions below. See Suggestions (under the “Make it Better” step) for more information:

How to play Ayo, as played by many people in Nigeria (another version of Ayoayo is listed below):

Setup:  Four seeds are placed in each house (each cup of the egg carton). Each row of 6 cups is the territory of the player sitting nearest to them.

Object of the game:  The object of the game is to capture as many seeds as possible.

Starting: One child should place a seed in either of their closed fists and ask the other child to guess which hand it is in. If the guesser is correct, they begin the game. If they guess incorrectly, the other child starts.

Sowing seeds:  The player who goes first chooses a house (cup) from their side of the board, scoops up all four seeds, and “sows” the seeds by dropping one in each cup after the starting cup, moving counterclockwise (left to right on their side of the board, then right to left when they are dropping seeds in cups on their opponent’s side of the board). Once those seeds are dropped, THEIR TURN IS OVER. The next player then chooses a cup on their own side and sows the seeds. This makes the game different from the Mancala game that many children have played, in which turns last a long time. Players can only begin their turn by selecting from a cup on their side of the board. Seeds are “sown” in a counterclockwise direction, placing 1 seed in each successive cup around the board (See Figure 2 for an illustration).

Capturing seeds 

Players can only capture seeds from their opponent’s side (the opposite side of the board). If the last seed that a player drops lands in one of their opponent’s houses with only one or two seeds already in it (making it two or three seeds in total), they then collect all of the seeds from that cup and keep them. If the previous-to-last seed that was dropped also brought an opponent’s house to two or three, these seeds are captured as well, and so on (See Figure 3 for an example of capturing seeds).

End of game 

The game usually ends when a player has captured 25 or more seeds and both players agree to stop. Each player takes any remaining seeds in his or her cups. The game can also end in a tie if both players have captured 24 seeds; a game can end if one player’s side has no seeds and his or her opponent is unable to sow any seeds onto the opposite side; and a game can end when neither player can capture any more seeds, as when two or three pieces are endlessly chasing each other around the board. Both players must agree to stop play, and split the remaining seeds evenly, with the player having the most seeds on his or her side keeping the odd one.

Other Rules

• If a player sows enough seeds to get back around to the original cup (this happens when 12 or more seeds are picked up from a cup), they skip over the empty cup that they started with and continue to sow seeds in the next cups until they have distributed all the seeds in their hand.
• If at any point in the game a player does not have any seeds on their side of the board, then the other player must sow seeds from a cup that would provide the opponent with seeds to continue playing. If this isn’t possible then the game ends, with the remaining seeds going to the player who still has seeds on their side.
• If a move is made that would leave all of the opponent cups empty without seeds, no seeds are captured. This includes a “grand slam”, where a player captures all of the seeds on their opponent’s side in one turn. If a player finds that this move has happened, they capture no seeds that turn.

Let’s Talk About It

After each team has played once, gather your students together to talk about what they have discovered. Is this a hard or an easy game? Did anyone discover any strategies for playing well?

Build On What They Talked About

After playing a few times, teams can switch partners if they would like to play with someone else.

After your kids have mastered Ayo, introduce them every few days or few weeks to a new “sowing game” from a different part of Africa. Print this PDF (click here) for 9 other ways of playing sowing games using the same materials. Which one do kids like playing most?