Oware is a game which is hard to ignore here at MSO4. The beautiful African wooden boards and lively atmosphere strike you almost as soon as you enter Alexandra Palace. The players can't hide their enthusiasm either and when I asked about the game, I was told that this was comparable to asking about life itself before being directed to Pol, a eleven-year old Catalonian boy sitting at a computer nearby.

Oware in progress at MSO 4

Pol was playing Oware against a computer program called Awale, one of the dozens of other names by which the game is sometimes known. He explained the rules in his charming slightly broken English while I started a game. One of the advantages of playing on a computer is that it will only let you make legal moves!

It is possible to pick the rules up in a couple of minutes, and the best way to learn them quickly is probably to be shown them by someone else. The game is played between two players on a board with two rows of six holes, one row of which is your territory and the other your opponent's.

There are four seeds in each hole initially and the aim is to capture the most seeds. On your turn you chose one of your holes and 'sow' the seeds anti-clockwise around the board, capturing seeds in the last holes of a sowing if these holes contain two or three seeds.

The game becomes addictive very quickly, and its simplicity is quite compelling. Even once I'd started to learn to look more than one move ahead, I felt clueless about strategy and was still playing totally randomly at the start of the game. Sometimes if I looked sufficiently desperately at Pol he would hint at which move to make so I picked a few things up that way.

He also told me which first move the world champion, who is from Antigua (one of the chief places the games is played), told him was the best. So I played that religiously even though I didn't have the skill to exploit it! After a while though, Pol started refusing to help me and just smiled mischievously during one end-game where I floundered for about twenty minutes before eventually capturing the one seed I needed to win.

Pol was taught Oware three years ago by a friend back home in Catalonia and his talent was spotted by senior players at a tournament in Barcelona. He's hoping to become one of next year's 'international students' to receive coaching from Oware players in London. Each year several promising players about his age are selected for practical and theoretical training. Pol playing Oware

On the practical side the students must play in a certain number tournaments, at least one of which must be abroad, as well as play at least two master players. The theoretical side involves analysis, strategy and learning about the history of the game, and the students must pass an examination in order to graduate. Those who do manage to graduate often go on to become master players.

When Pol left me to play one last game, he gave me a wicked grin. When the computer beat me in under a minute, I checked the skill level and discovered that he had secretly changed it from the Beginner level to the Grandmaster level while I was talking to another player!