GAMES AROUND THE WORLD #1:YOTE

This is HOPEFULLY the first Instructable in a series of Instructables that teach you how to play exotic, ancient, or otherwise fun games in case you are bored with the games you have. In this Instructable, I will teach you how to play the game Yote, a game played by African tribes.

You need one 5 square by 6 square Yote game board, 24 pieces, 12 black and 12 white, and a person to drag over to the Yote board that way you can play this game.

This is HOPEFULLY the first Instructable in a series of Instructables that teach you how to play exotic, ancient, or otherwise fun games in case you are bored with the games you have. In this Instructable, I will teach you how to play the game Yote, a game played by African tribes.

The goal of this game, like checkers, is to capture and remove all of your opponent's pieces. Also like checkers, the method of capturing and removing your opponent's pieces is to jump over them, but the similarities end there. The game is played on a 5 square by 6 square board, forming a rectangle.This game is for 2 players, and they can sit anywhere they like around the board. The player with the black pieces goes first, play then alternating between the 2 players. There is no setup of the pieces on the board. Like some other games I know of, like Choko or most reconstructions of Ludus Latrunculorum (more on those games some other time) pieces are placed on any unoccupied space on the board, one piece per turn. You are able to move your pieces 1 square orthogonally, or up, down, left, or right, except when you jump an opponent's piece, in which case you move 2 squares orthogonally, jumping your opponent. If you still have pieces to place that are currently off the board, but the pieces that you currently have on the board can move the way I described, you can move 1 piece that you control on the board instead of "dropping" one onto the board from your "store" or "hand".

Like I said earlier, you win by capturing all of your opponent's pieces, and you capture them by jumping over them orthogonally. Capturing is not compulsive, meaning you don't have to capture if you don't want to. When you do capture a piece, you get to remove another piece of your opponent's anywhere on the board! This rule is called "huffing". You can jump multiple times on your turn, like checkers, but continuing the capture sequence is optional, and you can stop it at any time. When you do multiple captures in 1 turn, you still only get 1 extra turn, but you can huff your opponent up to as many times as you captured on that one turn.

OTHER RULES

As soon as one player notices that both players are down to 3 or fewer pieces, he/she can do one of 2 things:

1) He/she can declare a draw, no questions asked.

2)He/she can ignore it, in hopes of winning the game.

VARIANT RULES

If both players agree beforehand, you can add one or more of these rules:

• captures are mandatory if you can do one.
• you can only do 1 jump per turn.
• capturing DOES NOT give you a bonus turn.
• you can jump one of your own pieces-it is not mandatory and it does not capture your own piece.
• This rule I'm about to show you has 2 variants in itself:

1)If a player has cannot move on his/her turn, the game ends and the player with more pieces is the winner, or

2) A player who cannot move on his turn loses.

• and you can replace the rule in the OTHER RULES section with the following one: Once one or both players notice that they both have only 3 or less pieces, you have to declare a draw, no questions asked, and there is no choice in the matter.

I know all of you that read this article will have a good time with this game, so have fun and expect more Instructables to come on a device near you! And one more thing...

Here are some links that I came across that will give you more information about this game. Enjoy, and hopefully there will be more Instructables in this series.

Cyningstan

Yote Wikipedia

YOTE MINDSPORTS

Yote Document

NOW GET OUT THERE AND CRUSH ALL YOUR FRIENDS AT THIS GAME!!