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=                              Mancala                               =
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                            Introduction
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Mancala ( 'manqalah') is a family of two-player turn-based strategy
board games played with small stones, beans, marbles or seeds and rows
of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface.  The
objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent's
pieces.

Versions of the game date back past the 3rd century and evidence
suggests such games existed in Ancient Egypt. It is among the oldest
known family of games to still be widely played today.


                              History
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According to some experts, the oldest discovered mancala boards are in
'Ain Ghazal, Jordan in the floor of a Neolithic dwelling as early as
~5,870 BC although this claim has been disputed by others. More recent
and undisputed claims concern artifacts from the city of Gedera in an
excavated Roman bathhouse where pottery boards and rock cuts that were
unearthed dating back to between the 2nd and 3rd century AD. Among
other early evidence of the game are fragments of a pottery board and
several rock cuts found in Aksumite areas in Matara (in Eritrea) and
Yeha (in Ethiopia), which are dated by archaeologists to between the
6th and 7th centuries AD.

The oldest mention of the game is in the "Kitab al-Aghani" ("'Book of
Songs'") of the 10th-century, attributed to Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani.
The game may have been mentioned by Giyorgis of Segla in his 14th
century Geʽez text 'Mysteries of Heaven and Earth', where he refers to
a game called qarqis, a term used in Geʽez to refer to both Gebet'a
(mancala) and 'Sant'araz' (modern 'sent'erazh', Ethiopian chess).
Evidence of the game has also been uncovered in Kenya.

The games have also existed in Eastern Europe. In Estonia, it was once
very popular (see "Bohnenspiel"), and likewise in  Bosnia (where it is
called Ban-Ban and still played today), Serbia, and Greece ("Mandoli",
Cyclades). Two mancala tables from the early 18th century are to be
found in Weikersheim Castle in southern Germany. In western Europe, it
never caught on but was documented by Oxford University orientalist
Thomas Hyde.

In the United States a traditional mancala game called Warra was still
played in Louisiana in the early 20th century, and a commercial
version called Kalah became popular in the 1940s. In Cape Verde,
mancala is known as "ouril". It is played on the Islands and was
brought to the United States by Cape Verdean immigrants. It is played
to this day in Cape Verdean communities in New England.

Historians may have found evidence of mancala in slave communities of
the Americas. The game was brought to the Americas by enslaved
Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The game was played by
enslaved Africans to foster community and develop social skills.
Archeologists may have found evidence of the game mancala played in
Nashville, Tennessee at the Hermitage Plantation.

Recent studies of mancala rules have given insight into the
distribution of mancala. This distribution has been linked to
migration routes, which may go back several hundred years.


                             Etymology
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The word 'mancala' () is a tool noun derived from an Arabic root
'naqala' () meaning "to move".


                          General gameplay
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Most mancala games have a common gameplay. Players begin by placing a
certain number of seeds, prescribed for the particular game, in each
of the pits on the game board. A player may count their stones to plot
the game. A turn consists of removing all seeds from a pit, "sowing"
the seeds (placing one in each of the following pits in sequence), and
capturing based on the state of the board. The game's object is to
plant the most seeds in the bank. This leads to the English phrase
"count and capture" sometimes used to describe the gameplay. Although
the details differ greatly, this general sequence applies to all
games.

If playing in capture mode, once a player ends their turn in an empty
pit on their own side, they capture the opponent's pieces directly
across. Once captured, the player gets to put the seeds in their own
bank. After capturing, the opponent forfeits a turn.


Equipment
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Equipment is typically a board, constructed of various materials, with
a series of holes arranged in rows, usually two or four. The materials
include clay and other shapeable materials. Some games are more often
played with holes dug in the earth, or carved in stone. The holes may
be referred to as "depressions", "pits", or "houses". Sometimes, large
holes on the ends of the board called 'stores', are used for holding
the pieces.

Playing pieces are seeds, beans, stones, cowry shells, half-marbles or
other small undifferentiated counters that are placed in and
transferred about the holes during play.

Board configurations vary among different games but also within
variations of a given game; for example Endodoi is played on boards
from 2×6 to 2×10. The largest are Tchouba (Mozambique) with a board of
160 (4×40) holes requiring 320 seeds, and En Gehé (Tanzania), played
on longer rows with up to 50 pits (a total of 2×50=100) and using 400
seeds. The most minimalistic variants are Nano-Wari and Micro-Wari,
created by the Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova. The Nano-Wari board
has eight seeds in just two pits; Micro-Wari has a total of four seeds
in four pits.

With a two-rank board, players usually are considered to control their
respective sides of the board, although moves often are made into the
opponent's side. With a four-rank board, players control an inner row
and an outer row, and a player's seeds will remain in these closest
two rows unless the opponent captures them.


Objective
===========
The objective of most two- and three-row mancala games is to capture
more stones than the opponent; in four-row games, one usually seeks to
leave the opponent with no legal move or sometimes to capture all
counters in their front row.

At the beginning of a player's turn, they select a hole with seeds
that will be sown around the board. This selection is often limited to
holes on the current player's side of the board, as well as holes with
a certain minimum number of seeds.

In a process known as 'sowing', all the seeds from a hole are dropped
one by one into subsequent holes in a motion wrapping around the
board. Sowing is an apt name for this activity, since not only are
many games traditionally played with seeds but placing seeds one at a
time in different holes reflects the physical act of sowing. If the
sowing action stops after dropping the last seed, the game is
considered a 'single lap' game.

'Multiple laps' or 'relay sowing' is a frequent feature of mancala
games, although not universal. When relay sowing, if the last seed
during sowing lands in an occupied hole, all the contents of that
hole, including the last sown seed, are immediately re-sown from the
hole. The process usually will continue until sowing ends in an empty
hole. Another common way to receive "multiple laps" is when the final
seed sown lands in your designated hole.

Many games from the Indian subcontinent use 'pussakanawa laps'. These
are like standard multi-laps, but instead of continuing the movement
with the contents of the last hole filled, a player continues with the
next hole. A pussakanawa lap move will then end when a lap ends just
before an empty hole.

If a player ends their stone with a point move they get a "free turn".


Capturing
===========
Depending on the last hole sown in a lap, a player may 'capture'
stones from the board. The exact requirements for capture, as well as
what is done with captured stones, vary considerably among games.
Typically, a capture requires sowing to end in a hole with a certain
number of stones, ending across the board from stones in specific
configurations or landing in an empty hole adjacent to an opponent's
hole that contains one or more pieces.

Another common way of capturing is to capture the stones that reach a
certain number of seeds at any moment.

Also, several games include the notion of capturing holes, and thus
all seeds sown on a captured hole belong at the end of the game to the
player who captured it.


                         Names and variants
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The name is a classification or type of game, rather than any specific
game. Some of the most popular mancala games (concerning distribution
area, the numbers of players and  tournaments, and publications) are:
* Bao - played in most of East Africa including Kenya, Tanzania,
Comoros, Madagascar, Malawi, as well as some areas of DR Congo, and
Burundi.
* Gebeta (Tigrinya: ገበጣ) - played in Ethiopia and Eritrea (especially
in Tigray).
* Kalah - North American variation, the most popular variant in the
Western world.
* Omweso ('mweso') - played in Uganda, some players and tournaments
also in the UK.
* Oware ('awalé, awélé, awari') - Ashanti, but played world-wide
including Europe (England, France, Catalonia, Portugal), where it is
mostly played (but not exclusively) by expatriates; close variants in
West Africa (e.g., Ayo by Yorubas (Nigeria), Ouri (Cape Verde)) and
Warri in the Caribbean.
* Pallanguzhi - played in Tamil Nadu, India.
* Ovvaḷugoṇḍi - played in Maldives
* Songo - played in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, also among
expatriates in France.
* Sungka - Popular variants are known as Congklak (a.k.a. 'congkak',
'congka', 'tjongklak', 'jongklak') and Dakon (or ) - played in
Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei; boards are
often sold in fairtrade shops in Germany and other European countries.
* Toguz korgool or Toguz kumalak - played in Kyrgyzstan and
Kazakhstan, tournaments also in Europe.
*  Eson Khorgol (Mongolian: "nine balls"), also Eson Xorgol, played by
the Kazakh minority in the aimag province of Bayan Ölgii in
north-western Mongolia. The game was first described in 1963.

Although more than 800 names of traditional mancala games are known,
some names denote the same game, while others are used for more than
one game. Almost 200 modern invented versions have also been
described.


                             Psychology
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Like other board games, mancala games have led to psychological
studies. Retschitzki has studied the cognitive processes used by awalé
players. Some of Restchitzki's results on memory and problem solving
have recently been simulated by Fernand Gobet with the CHREST computer
model. De Voogt has studied the psychology of Bao playing.


                            Competition
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Several groups of mancala games have their own tournaments. A medley
tournament including at least two modalities has been part of the Mind
Sports Olympiad, including in the in-person event and the online Grand
Prix.


Mancala at the Mind Sports Olympiad
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|London 2015    |       |       |
|Online Grand Prix 2023         |       |       |


                              See also
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* Abstract strategy games
* List of mancala games
* Computer Olympiad#Awari


                          Further reading
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*
*
*
*
*
* Deledicq, A. & A. Popova (1977). Wari et solo. Le jeu de calcul
Africain. Paris: Cedic.
* Murray, H.J.R. (1952). 'A History of Board-Games other than Chess'.
Oxford at the Clarendon Press.
*
* Voogt, A.J. de (1997). Mancala Board Games. British Museum Press:
London.


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