Discover mancala

[maiki]

Continuing the discussion from Oct 24, 2019:

@maiki

Turns out, mancala is a family of games! So much to learn!

Mancala

Names and variants

See also: Southeast Asian mancala

The name is a classification or type of game, rather than any specific game. Some of the most popular mancala games (with regard to distribution area, the numbers of players and tournaments, and publications) are:

• Ali Guli Mane or Pallanguzhi, played in Southern India.
• It is also called Omanu Guntalu in Telugu, played in rural areas of Telangana, India.
• Bao la Kiswahili – played in most of East Africa including Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Malawi, as well as some areas of DR Congo and Burundi.[1]
• Gebeta (Tigrigna: ገበጣ) - Ethiopian and Eritrea, especially in Tigrai.
• Kalah – North American variation, the most popular variant in the Western world.
• Oware ( awalé, awélé ) – Ashanti, but played world-wide with close variants played throughout western Africa and in the Caribbean.[2][3][4]
• Ayo or oware - played in West Africa, by the Yorubas in Western Nigeria.
• Toguz korgool or Toguz kumalak – played in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
• Igisoro, played in Rwanda.

A notable subtype of mancala are the Southeast Asian mancalas like the Malaysian congkak , Indonesians congklak or dakon , and Filipino sungka , among others. They differ from other mancala types in that the player’s store is included in the placing of the seeds. The most common type has seven holes for each player, in addition to the player store holes. This version has identical rules throughout its range. But there are also numerous variations with the number of holes and rules by region. Sometimes more than one version can be played in a single locality.[5]

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

Game pages! A page for each! With rules!

[maiki]

One of the reasons to make good rules pages is most of these games have perfect plays, and I find it demoralizing to learn a new game that’s “solved”. Better to learn something to the imagination.

[trashHeap]

In college me and a good friend bought a really cheap mancalla set from a local store with a terrible set of instructions. We thought we mostly grokked them and played for a number of years, though I eventually began to suspect we had kind of hodgepodged and telephone-gamed our waty into out own variant, or a variant of a variant.

Not nearly as good or clever as some of the of the actual mancala variants in existence I suspect. But it gave me an appreciation for mancala being a family of games, and how easy it was to build a family of games around abstract game sets.