Players recently faced off around an antique kōnane board that had been used over a century ago. The board is one of only six in existence today, and it felt especially fitting that the Bishop Museum brought it out for the inaugural Ka Makou Kōnane Invitational Tournament.
Kapena Baptista went home with the win and a replica of the museum’s rare board. Baptista is a kōnane advocate and co-organizer of the tournament. The Conversation spoke with Baptista about why he has worked so hard to uplift this ancient board game.
Interview Highlights
On the origins of kōnane
KAPENA BAPTISTA: So I get asked all the time, you know, like: Where does kōnane come from? Or, like, what is it? Yeah, and, you know, kōnane is something very uniquely Hawaiian. It exists nowhere else in the world, and in fact, nowhere else in Polynesia. A lot of things that we have in Hawaiʻi have analogous things that occur on our kind of cousin islands, but kōnane is not one of them. It's something that only exists here, and is kind of the brainchild of some very, very brilliant kūpuna out there. And I just think it's so special that we as Hawaiians could kind of really claim ownership of that and really make it our own.
On “Hawaiian checkers” being a misnomer
BAPTISTA: The undergirding philosophy that underpins so much of it is just so different from just calling it checkers. And that really inspired me to look into it a lot deeper. And I wanted to know, you know, kind of what the origin of it, of calling it checkers, was from. And it turns out it comes from Captain James Cook's crew. They saw it, they witnessed it being played everywhere, and they're like, oh, we don't get it, it looks complicated, but they're jumping over pieces — it looks like checkers, so call it checkers. So that's where that comes from. So every time we call it Hawaiian checkers, we're kind of taking the perspective of James Cook here, yeah, and for me, as a Native Hawaiian, I think that's just kind of wrong for us to do, and that it's incumbent upon us to really understand kōnane as it is on its own.
On the philosophy behind kōnane gameplay
BAPTISTA: We like to think about games as being expressions of cultural thought or values. I mean, you think of a game like checkers. What's the goal? The goal is to completely exterminate your opponent, yeah? You leave no one alive. You're just completely exterminating them. And from our perspective as Hawaiians, that's not a Hawaiian value. You cannot just eat everything up on an island. You're not going to survive. There needs to be some kind of regenerative aspect, some idea of looking forward toward the future. Our game is what we call pili, very related to Hawaiian martial arts, lua. And lua, by extension, is related to hula, right? These are things that are very concerned with movement of the body, and lua in particular — I don't know if you've ever seen like a lua practitioner, people doing those kinds of things — but they're not concerned about killing you, so to speak. They're more concerned about subduing you, right? Gonna break your legs or something, or your arm or your shoulder, very kind of similar in kōnane, where I'm not trying to take all your pieces, I'm just trying to make sure that you can't have a move, that you cannot make a valid jump over my piece, and that you're completely locked up. And you can see an endgame in kōnane, and see a lot of stones still up there, and you're like, wait, how is this game over? Then you look really closely, it's like, oh, black cannot jump anywhere, and white just has them completely, you know, like locked up. It's something very, very different from Western games, yeah. And I think that has a lot of value for us, not just as Native Hawaiians, but everyone that lives in Hawaiʻi, everyone that lives in an area or a space that needs to regenerate its resources sustainably.
This story aired on The Conversation on Feb. 23, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
