

Take two half dozen egg cartons, tear the tops off them both, and arrange them in a long line (lid, base, base, lid). Children can even be encouraged to make the game themselves as follows: These games are good for getting children interacting and used to counting. 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. 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.

Nickernuts are one common example of pieces used.īoard 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. Playing pieces are seeds, stones, dung balls or other small undifferentiated counters that are placed in and transferred about the holes during play. Sometimes, large holes on the ends of the board, called stores, are used for holding captured pieces. The holes may be referred to as "depressions", "pits", or "houses". Other materials are also used such as clay, metal, cardboard or even feces. Sedentary groups usually prefer wooden boards.

Often the holes are just dug in the earth, especially among nomadic people. The number of holes per row may range from 1 ( Nano-Wari) to 50 ( En Gehé). 55Stones, Sowing, Atomic Wari) are played on one-row boards. In Yunnan (China), a game is known ( Laomuzhuqi), which has five rows and in Madagascar a game with six rows was described ( Katro). In the Horn of Africa boards with three rows are widespread (one example: Selus).
#Mancala playing pieces series
Although the details differ greatly, this general sequence applies to all games.Ī swan-shaped Malaysian Congkak board in the National Museum of Malaysia.Įquipment is typically a board with a series of holes arranged in rows, usually two or four. This leads to the English phrase "Count and Capture" sometimes used to describe the gameplay. 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 board. A player may count their stones to plot the game. Players begin by placing a certain number of seeds, prescribed for the particular game, in each of the holes on the game board. Most Mancala games share a common general game play. The Nano-Wari board has eight seeds in just two pits Micro-Wari has a total of four seeds in four pits. The most minimalistic variants are Nano-Wari and Micro-Wari, created by the Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova.

En Gehé (Tanzania) is played on longer rows with up to 50 pits (a total of 2x50=100) and uses 400 seeds. Tchouba employs a board of 160 (4x40) holes and needs 320 seeds. The largest are Tchouba (Mozambique) and En Gehé (Tanzania). Toguz Kumalak - extremely important in Central Asia, where it is considered a sport superior to Chess.Oware - close variants are played in the Caribbean and throughout western Africa, also in immigrant communities in North America and Europe.Kalah - the only modern game, which has become a popular pastime (mostly played in the USA, where it is simply known as "Mancala", and Europe).Congkak - close variants in South Asia from the Maldives to the Philippines, known by many different names (e.g.Bao la Kiswahili - widespread along the east coast of Africa, and an integral part of Swahili culture one of the most difficult games to learn because of its rather complex rules.Some of the most popular mancala games (with regard to distribution area, and numbers of players, tournaments, and publications) are:. However, some names denote the same game, while some names are used for more than one game. More than 800 names of traditional mancala games are known, which are played in 99 countries, and almost 200 invented games have been described. Nobody knows the exact number of mancala variants. This word is used in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, but is not consistently applied to any one game. No one game exists with the name mancala the name is a classification or type of game. The word mancala comes from the Arabic word naqala meaning literally "moved". Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes called " sowing" games, or "count-and-capture" games, which describes the gameplay. Mancala → Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese.
