Urim
Game type: Two-row Atlantic island mancala (Cape Verde) — single-lap counter-clockwise sowing, trigger captures on twos and threes extending through continuous chains of twos, threes, and fours, and fractional match-point scoring.
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Overview
Urim (also known across various Cape Verdean islands as Ouri, Huri, Ourim, Òrè, Ori, or Uril) is the traditional two-row mancala cultivated on the island of Brava in Cape Verde and preserved by Cape Verdean emigrant communities in Angola. Sharing historical kinship with Portuguese Ouri and the Orôà tradition of Guinea-Bissau, Urim represents a distinctive insular evolution of the West African Oware complex. First described in ethnographic detail by Cape Verdean scholar Elísio Romariz Santos Silva in 1994, the game is traditionally contested by adult men seated across carved wooden benches termed banco de ouri, using polished nickernuts (Caesalpinia crista).
While basic sowing mechanics mirror classical Oware, Urim introduces captivating tactical deviations: an expanded capture-chaining rule that sweeps up quadruplets in addition to pairs and triplets, an explicit tactical limit capping hole capacity at 17 seeds, and a tiered match-point scoring system based on the proportion of counters captured.
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 6 or 7 holes per row depending on local board carving
- Stores: End hollows to store captured seeds; each player owns the store on their right
- Seeds per hole at start: 3 (yielding 36 seeds on a 2×6 board, or 42 seeds on a 2×7 board)
- Pit limit: A single pit may not contain more than 17 seeds at any time.
How to Play
- Play proceeds counter-clockwise around the board in single laps. Players alternate turns.
- On a turn, a player scoops all seeds from one of their own pits and distributes them one by one into subsequent pits counter-clockwise.
- Feeding obligation: A player must feed an opponent who is entirely out of seeds, if an available move can drop seeds into the opponent's row.
- Sowing skips the emptied origin pit if a full circuit of 12 (or 14) seeds is completed.
Capturing
- Trigger: A capture is initiated only when the final seed (urin) lands in an opponent's pit, bringing its seed count to exactly two or three.
- Expanded chain: Once triggered, preceding contiguous opponent pits are captured as well if they hold two, three, or four seeds!
- If the final seed itself lands in a pit and makes four, no capture is triggered (the initial trigger is strictly two or three).
- Captured seeds are deposited into the player's end store.
End of Game and Winning
- The game concludes when a player cannot make a legal move (starvation) or when remaining seeds cycle endlessly without captures.
- Match points:
- A player scores 2 points for capturing at least three-quarters (3/4) of all seeds in play (27 or more seeds on a 36-seed board; 32 or more on a 42-seed board).
- A player scores 1 point for capturing more than half the seeds but less than three-quarters (19 to 26 seeds on a 36-seed board; 22 to 31 on a 42-seed board).
- Otherwise, no points are awarded or the match is drawn.
Notes
- A beloved Cape Verdean Creole riddle evokes the game's anatomy: "Doze boc', quarenta e oit' dente" ("Twelve mouths, forty-eight teeth — ouri"), reflecting ancestral 4-seed sets alongside Brava's 3-seed competition practice.
- The term urin refers both to the pivotal final seed dropped from the hand and to the dramatic scoring strike it delivers.
Source: Mancala World – Urim