Awithlaknakwe

Awithlaknakwe, aka,  The Stone Warriors, is a traditional board game played by the Zuni in the area of New Mexico. The game was mentioned by Stewart Culin in his book about traditional games from Native American tribes [1].

The game is played on this 12x12 board, with extra slots to place the player's six pieces (for two or four players):

The rules, as described by Culin, are not completely specified:

• Pieces move one step diagonally forward
  
• Captures are custodian: if a piece moves into a square, forming a line of friend-enemy-friend pieces, the enemy piece is captured [the capture is not said to be diagonally, orthogonally, or both]
  
• In the first capture, the player replaces the captured piece by a 'priest', i.e., a piece that moves like the Chess-king (except it still cannot move backwards)
  
•  Wins the player that first moves his [remaining?] pieces to the adversary home

Some reconstructions also include the number of captured pieces (by adding some scoring into the winning condition). However, it seems to be enough to consider the race element. Letting a piece be captured can be seen as a sacrifice to gain tempo, by having less pieces to move into the enemy's home base.

[1] Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indians, University of California Libraries (1907)