How to play Morabaraba

Morabaraba is a traditional Basotho strategy game for two players. It is played across Lesotho and South Africa, often on a board scratched into the ground with stones and bottle tops for pieces. These are the full rules, as the game is played here.

Play Morabaraba

The board

The board has 25 spots where the lines cross: three squares sitting inside each other, joined at the corners and through the middle of each side. The middle lines meet at the centre. Your pieces live on the spots and walk along the lines.

Setup

You each get 12 pieces with your own token so you can tell them apart. Someone is picked at random to go first.

First, you place

Take turns dropping one piece at a time onto any empty spot you like. Keep going until you have both placed all 12.

Then, you move

Now the pieces start walking. On your turn, slide one of your pieces along a line to an empty spot right next to it. There is no jumping and no flying: a piece only ever steps to a neighbouring spot.

Mills and capturing

Get three of your pieces in a straight line and that is a mill. You immediately take one of your opponent's pieces, any one you like, from anywhere on the board. Nobody is safe. This works while placing and while moving.

During placement, even if one move completes two lines at once, you take one piece. In the movement phase, completing two lines lets you take two.

Attacking is compulsory

If you can close a mill on your turn, you must close it. Playing somewhere else while an attack is on the table loses the game. Everyone carries one save per game: the first time you walk past a mill, a notice hands the turn back so you can play it. There is no second one.

Blocking is compulsory too, while placing

If your opponent is one placement away from a mill and you have no mill of your own to close, you must place a piece that stops it. Seeing a mill coming and dropping a piece elsewhere is not a choice.

This applies only while placing. Once the pieces are down, a forced block costs more than it saves: the piece has to come from somewhere, and dragging it off its own line to answer one mill can open another. In the movement phase you defend because you want to, not because you have to.

Stuck with nowhere to go?

If all your pieces are boxed in, you sit out your turns until a gap opens up. Fair is fair though: once your opponent has made three moves in a row while you are stuck, their next move has to let you back into the game, if there is any way to do it.

When the game goes in circles

A placement phase with no captures fills 24 of the 25 spots, so the movement phase can turn into a sliding puzzle where neither player wants to be the one to give ground. Whoever holds the centre can refuse to step off it and shuffle a spare piece instead, and the game stops moving.

So once the same position has come round three times, whoever is sitting on the centre point has to move off it. If that piece is boxed in, they have to move the piece beside it that can let it out instead. The obligation belongs to the player holding the middle and never passes to their opponent. A mill on the table still comes first.

Winning

Grind your opponent down to two pieces and the game is yours. With two they can never fill a line again, so they can never capture and can never come back, and the game ends right there instead of dragging on. Every piece counts the same. No kings, no queens, no favourites.

Ready?

You can play a friend online, send someone a private invite link, share one screen, or take on the computer at three strengths.

Play Morabaraba