Mancala Describes a Family of Board Games Played Around The
Name______
MANCALA
The History
- Mancala describes a family of board games played around the
World
- They are also called sowing games, count and capture games or
pit and pebble games
- The word Mancala comes from the Arabic word naqala meaning “to move”.
- The oldest evidence of mancala was found in Ethiopia from the 6th and 7th century AD.
- People unfamiliar with mancala games commonly assume there is a particular game with the name Mancala
- There are actually more than 282 variations of Mancala! These include boards with different numbers of seeds and different dimensions of holes.
The Board
A mancala board is composed of rows of holes.
The holes may be referred to as "depressions", "pits", or "houses". Sometimes, large holes on the ends of the board, called stores or kalas, are used for holding captured pieces. Playing pieces are seeds, stones, marbles, or other small undifferentiated counters that are placed in and transferred about the holes during play.
Mancala boards are made of a wide range of materials such as wood, stone, clay, metal, ivory, palm ribs, plastic, cardboard, and even dried cowdung. In pastoral or nomadic societies, boards are often just dig into the earth.
Rules
Moves in mancala games consist of distributing (or spreading) stones into succeeding pits. Each move consists of one or several laps.
Sowing
At the beginning of a player's turn, they select a hole with seeds that will be sown around the board. This selection is limited to holes on the current player's side of the board.
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. 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 resown from the hole. The process usually continues until sowing ends in an empty hole.
Many games from the Indian subcontinent, southern China and Vietnam use pussa kanawa laps. These are like standard multilaps, but instead of continuing the movement with the contents of the last hole filled, a player continues with the next hole. A pussa kanawa lap move will then end when a lap ends just prior to an empty hole.
Capturing
Depending on the last hole sown in a lap, a player may capture seeds from the board. The exact requirements for capture, as well as what is done with captured seeds, vary considerably among games. Typically, a capture requires sowing to end in a hole with a certain number of seeds, or ending across the board from seeds in specific configurations.
Single Lap:
Play ends once the first pile of seeds are sown. A player continues only when ending in his or her mancala.
Multiple Lap:
Multi-lap moves don't end after the first sowing, but continues, usually with the contents of the last hole into which a seed was dropped until the lap ends in an empty hole.
Differences between Single Lap and Multiple Lap Games
- Multiple lap moves effect more holes so that the resulting board position is more difficult to predict. Multi-lap games tend to have less "clarity" as defined by J. Mark Thompson.
- Multiple lap moves can lead to never-ending moves cycling around the board for ever.
- When single and multiple lap games (Western Africa and the Caribbean) are known in the same area, the single-lap games are often played by adult men and the multiple lap games by children and women.
The first lap begins with the white pit.
The board after the first lap.
After the second lap.
After the third lap.
The fourth lap ends the move because the last seed (the black one) fell into an empty pit.
Strategy
Capturing by Opposition
In these games seeds are captured, when the last seed of a lap falls into an empty hole on the player's own side of the board and the opposite hole of his opponent is occupied. Then he captures the seeds in the opposite hole and in two-row games often also the seed in his hole, which effected the capture.
Capturing in Kalah
South starts his first move from his first hole.
It ends in his "kalah".
So he gets a bonus move. He sows the contents of his rightmost hole.
The last seed was dropped into an empty hole on his side and the opposite hole had 6 seeds. He captures 7 seeds.
Mancala and Modular Arithmetic
Suppose you have 15 seeds in hole number 3. If you sow the seeds in hole number 3, in which hole will your last seed land? Don't forget the seed for your mancala.
The connection between mancala and modular arithmetic is that it is useful to know where you sow your last seed. You can think of this as a mod 12 problem where you always subtract an extra seed as you pass the mancala, or a mod 13 problem where you re-number the holes on the other side of the board. The answer to the problem on the board is 3 + 15 mod 12 = 6; subtract 1 for the mancala to get 5. The last seed goes into hole number 5 and the blue player captures a quantity of seeds from the opposite hole.