The championship match of the kōnane tournament will be played on a historic wooden papamū from Bishop Museum’s collection. Surviving wooden papamū are rare. There are only six known examples around the world: three in Bishop Museum’s collection, one at ʻIolani Palace, one at Hawaiʻi Volcano National Park, and another in a private collection in France, which was sold at Christi’s for €150,000 in 2017.

The wooden papamū selected for play in the tournament — object number B.07230 — was donated to Bishop Museum by Princess Elizabeth Kahanu, wife of Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole, as part of the Kalanianaʻole-Kapiʻolani Collection. This board’s connection to the Kalākaua family is exciting; according to former Bishop Museum Director William Tufts Brigham, both Queen Kapiʻolani and King Kalākaua were expert players of kōnane.

It is unknown when this board was last played before its accession into the collection in 1923. The Ka Makou Kōnane tournament will mark the first time the kōnane board has been played on in more than 100 years, a revival meant to inspire a new generation.

Kōnane was once so commonplace in Hawaiian society, few took the time to write about it in detail. While kōnane exists in various moʻolelo of aliʻi playing to at least the 15th century, the earliest written account of kōnane actually comes from a man named James King, a crew member aboard Capt. James Cook’s final voyage in 1776. He wrote:

“[The Hawaiians] have a game very much like our draughts [checkers]; but, if one may judge from the number of squares, it is much more intricate. The board is about two feet long, and it is divided into two hundred and thirty-eight squares, of which there are fourteen in a row (i.e. 14×17), and they make use of black and white pebbles, which they move from square to square”

This is the very first comparison of kōnane to European checkers, and “checkers” has remained a comparative label meant to make the game more understandable from a Western perspective ever since.

Sadly, this has had consequences on the way people make, play and understand kōnane itself. Suffice to say, we have been calling kōnane “Hawaiian Checkers” for so long we began to make the boards like square checkers boards. If you own a kōnane board at home, odds are it is a square 6×6, 8×8, or 10×10, like a European-style checkers board.

In a survey conducted of all six existing wooden kupuna kōnane boards and more than a dozen stone boards along the Kona coast of Hawaiʻi Island, all traditional kōnane boards consisted of an even number and an odd number (i.e. 6×7, 8×11, 12×15, or 14×17). Not a single board was a square.

This finding is very significant because it represents a fundamental difference between how our kupuna played kōnane and how we play today. In a correctly configured Even x Odd board, two fundamentally Hawaiian concepts emerge on the board itself. The first is the “piko,” or the center of the board. On an Even x Odd board, you get a true piko for bothe the black and white pieces, and in most historical boards, this part was inlaid with precious material like shell or a human tooth.

The other concept that emerges on an Even x Odd board are the Hawaiian cardinal directions. In kōnane, the black pieces are made from basaltic lava, the very same lava that forms the land we live on, and the white pieces are made from coral found in the ocean. The odd side of the kōnane board will have its corner pieces be of the same color, revealing the “ma uka” or upland side of the board, and the “ma kai” or ocean side of the board. Traditionally, players would sit on the corresponding ma uka or ma kai side depending on the color they are playing.