About kōnane

Kōnane is a strategy game from the Hawaiian Islands. It developed there on its own, and no close relative of it is played anywhere else.

What outsiders saw

When European ships reached the islands in the late 1700s, members of Cook’s third voyage watched Hawaiians play a board game and described it as a kind of draughts. The comparison stuck, and it has undersold the game ever since.

Checkers moves in a direction, promotes its pieces, and rewards taking as much as possible. Kōnane does none of that. Every move is a jump, the board only ever loses stones, and the position gets sharper as it empties. Read the other way around, calling kōnane a form of checkers is generous to checkers.

Who played it, and why it mattered

Kōnane was played widely, but it mattered particularly to aliʻi and kāhuna, the chiefs and the expert class, who used it to sharpen the kind of thinking their positions demanded: reading an opponent, holding a position several moves out, recognising an exchange that looks favourable and goes nowhere. Accounts describe the game being used to work through disagreements, and to occupy the mind while a decision waited.

It was treated as an exercise in judgement rather than a way to pass an afternoon.

Light and dark

The board is the papamū, carved into stone or shaped from wood, with its grid worn into the surface. The pieces are ʻiliʻili, waterworn pebbles: black basalt from the lava flows, white coral from the reef.

Those materials come from the two halves of the islands themselves. One is made by fire and one by the sea, both are smoothed by water, and the game sets them against each other on a single surface.

How it was nearly lost

Through the nineteenth century, under missionary influence and colonial pressure, many Hawaiian practices were discouraged or actively suppressed. Kōnane was among them. Wagering sometimes accompanied play, and the game was condemned along with the betting.

Play declined steeply. What survived did so in families, in the written accounts of people who recorded it, and in boards held in collections, which was enough for the game to be carried forward rather than reconstructed. Kōnane is played in Hawaiʻi today at cultural gatherings and in classrooms, as part of a much broader revival of Hawaiian language and practice that is still going on.

The game is still playable because people worked deliberately to keep it.

What the game is about

Most strategy games reward accumulation. Kōnane works differently. Captures are not counted, and the player holding fewer stones very often wins.

Every jump you make spends something. It opens the position and changes what is still available to you, so a capture that gains nothing has cost you anyway. The skill lies in balance and trade-offs, in seeing which exchanges leave you somewhere to go and which strand you on a board that still looks full.

The ending is unusual too. You win when your opponent has no move left to make, which is to say when there is nothing further they can do against you. Getting there is less about taking as much as you can, and more about arriving at that position with a move still in hand.