Barbados Warri is the island's oldest surviving game. It is a member of a great family of pit-and-pebble strategy games that originated in the Sudan over 3600 years ago when accountants and engineers of the ancient Kush Civilization of the Upper Nile (today's Sudan) used counters on a tablet with depressions to carry out mathematical calculations. As such, Warri could possibly be called a descendant of the first "computer game".

Two variants of the game came across the Atlantic in the 17th Century with the introduction of African peoples in the Caribbean to work as slaves in the colony's tobacco and sugar plantations. The two games were kept alive over the years entirely by word-of-mouth or what is known as the oral tradition, but games with such formidable technical integrity as Warri are for obvious reasons handed down from generation to generation of players very accurately, and so we are able to use these two to conclude that Barbados' anthropological heritage and is rooted strongly in Asante and Yoruba. A Yoruban version of the game, Ayo Ayo, became known as "Round-and-Round Warri" in Barbados, while the more popular Asante version, Oware, has become established here as Barbados Warri.

Because the rules of both games have been preserved so faithfully over the ages, they are counted among the island's finest cultural retentions. The name Warri comes from an Ijo dialect word meaning "houses".

Pit and pebble games are probably the most arithmetical of all games, but Warri can be introduced purely as a game of chance to very young children, and even at this level, it has subtle educational value in encouraging the child to count. He or she progressively also learns the concept of one-to-one correspondence as he drops each one seed into each of a sequence of consecutive holes. Soon he learns simple sums in order to evaluate options and keep score.