About this site

The site is built and maintained by Statika AS in Norway. One person writes the code and the copy.

Kalah follows the standard rules printed with the game since the 1950s. Oware follows the abapa rules used in tournaments. Congklak follows the common seven-pit rules of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, played as a single round. Where traditions differ, the rule pages say so, and the rule builder lets you play it your way.

The computer opponent searches the game tree: it tries every move, every reply, and so on, as deep as its time allows, and picks the move that leaves it the largest lead. The hard level looks twelve to fourteen moves ahead in Kalah. The easy level searches two moves and sometimes plays at random. The search runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

The perfect-play results for Kalah are published work, cited from the Kalah article on Wikipedia. Geoffrey Irving and Jeroen Donkers (2000) proved the empty-capture results for Kalah(6,4) and (6,5). Anders Carstensen (2011) proved that Kalah(6,6) with empty capture is a first-player win. Mark Rawlings (2015) quantified every first move under both rule sets and the standard-rule margins. The computer opponent and the hints are this site's own search.

You may quote the rules and tables on this site with a link back. Search engines and AI answer engines are welcome to read and cite every page; robots.txt says so explicitly.

Write to kontakt@statika-as.com for corrections, questions or variants we have missed.