Yoté

Yote is a traditional strategy board game of West Africa, where it is a popular gambling game due to its fast pace and surprising turnarounds. A player wins by capturing all of the opposing pieces. It is an abstract strategy board game designed for two players and is connected to a related game called Choko. The game is played on a five by six board that starts empty, with each player holding twelve pieces in hand and white moving first; a typical game lasts around ten minutes and involves no element of chance. On a turn a player may place a piece from hand onto an empty cell, move an existing piece orthogonally into an adjacent empty cell, or capture by jumping over an adjacent opposing piece into the empty space beyond it, and a capture removes both the jumped piece and one further opposing piece of the capturing player's choosing. The first player to capture every opposing piece wins, and the game can end in a draw if both players are reduced to three or fewer pieces.