Take Only What You Need
A game taught face to face for centuries can now be played online from anywhere. What's next for kōnane?
Kōnane is having a renaissance. Uncle John Kaʻohelauliʻi has been teaching the game on Kauaʻi since 2011 and wrote The Black Book of Kōnane in 2023. This February, Kapena Baptista won the first statewide tournament in modern memory, playing on a koa papamū from Queen Kapiʻolani's collection.
Some have called it Hawaiian checkers, yet kōnane is a game of logic and strategy, closer to chess or go, and it's found nowhere else on earth. Now the game can be played online thanks to Andrew "Keahi" Castro. His ʻohana is from Oʻahu, but he grew up in California and now lives in Washington. From there, using a background in mathematics and statistics, he spent years building Likōnane while finishing a Hawaiian studies degree through Windward Community College entirely online. The app, Likōnane, includes remote play, puzzles, teaching resources, rankings, a forum, and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi throughout.
There's also an AI opponent named Lopako. There was a moment when a computer beating a grandmaster at chess was the definition of intelligence. Kōnane asks for something else entirely. Take only what you need, Baptista says, and you'll likely win. Take too much and you may lose.
Uncle John teaches kōnane face to face, and he's part of the lineage reviving it. Now Keahi has built it into code and made it free to the world. So what comes next? I'm excited to find out.