Yoté

Every capture is really two

The rule that defines Yoté is easy to miss and impossible to ignore once you know it: when you jump and capture an enemy stone, you also reach onto the board and pluck off a second enemy stone of your choice. One successful attack costs your opponent two pieces. That single detail turns Yoté into a tense, cagey game where a careless move loses a chunk of your army in one turn, and it rewards patience over aggression. You capture the familiar way, jumping a stone straight over an adjacent enemy into the empty square beyond, but because the payoff is doubled, both sides tend to circle warily rather than charge.

The square behind decides everything

A jump needs an empty landing square, so a stone can only be captured along a line where the square directly beyond it is empty. That gives you the most useful habit in the game: before you drop or move a stone, look down each straight line through its square. If a wall, one of your own stones, or even an enemy sits directly behind it, that direction is safe. Good players build short chains of stones that cover each other's backs, and they poke at enemy stones standing alone with daylight behind them. The board's edges make this concrete. A stone against a wall cannot be jumped across that wall, and a corner stone is protected from two directions at once, so early stones live longer near the edges, and attackers that chase them there keep running out of landing squares.

Baiting works because captures are so valuable. Here is the shape. Drop a stone next to an enemy so it looks free to take, but station another of your stones one square past the landing spot the enemy would jump into, with an empty square beyond that. The computer jumps your bait and takes a second stone, but its attacker has now landed right in front of your waiting stone, and you jump it back and pluck one of your own choosing. Two stones each. Level on the count, but you picked the timing, you picked which stones died, and its best attacker is off the board. An exchange in Yoté is never just arithmetic. What matters is where the jumping stones finish and whose shape is left standing.

Keep stones in reserve

At the start your pieces are not on the board at all. They sit in your hand, and each turn you either drop one onto any empty square or move one already in play. The temptation is to pour them out quickly and build a wall. Do not. Stones in hand are answers you have not committed yet: you get to respond to the opponent's shape after seeing it, drop a fresh stone exactly where the fight is, and avoid parking pieces on squares that turn into bait. Players who empty their hand early spend the rest of the game reacting. A decent rule is to hold a few stones back until the first captures have shown you where the battle actually is, then spend them like reinforcements arriving at the right gate.

Endgames come down to mobility. When the computer is down to its last few stones, do not chase captures recklessly. Herd its stones toward a corner, keep yours in pairs so their backs stay covered, and take the safe jump when it finally appears. You win when the opponent can no longer put up a fight, so material is not the goal by itself. A cornered army with no safe moves is beaten even before the last jump lands.

A West African classic

Yoté is played across West Africa, in Senegal, Mali, the Gambia and beyond, and it is often described as Senegal's favourite board game. The traditional version needs no board at all: players scoop a grid of holes in the sand, five rows by six, and play with sticks, pebbles or bits of pottery, twelve pieces a side, usually at speed and with onlookers offering loud advice. It belongs to the same jump-to-capture family as draughts, but the drop-your-own-stones opening and the two-for-one capture give it a character all its own: quieter openings, sharper punishments. Grind the computer down carefully, protect your backs, and the wins follow.