Mancala is a generic name for 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 name mancala is from the Arabic word manqala, which is derived from the verb naqala, “to move.” There are hundreds of mancala games, all of which are similar in their basic goals and methods of play, though they differ in detail.
Mancala is a game that makes regular appearances at board game nights. Played by school children and bar patrons alike, the game is immensely popular. Though it has fewer pieces than Monopoly, it hardly requires less strategy; it has simple rules, but it’s not easy to win. This paradoxical quality is likely why mancala has been played for literally thousands of years.
The word “mancala” is derived from the Arabic word “naqala” which means “to move” and is generally used to describe a family of board games that represents sowing and harvesting. It’s a two-player game that’s also called “pits and pebbles” since players sometimes choose to dig small holes to play if a board is not available.
How To Play Mancala For Beginners [SUPER SIMPLE Lesson!]
Origins and History
Mancala is one of the oldest known board games in existence, with origins dating back thousands of years. Examples of this game have been found in Egyptian ruins dated from 1400 B.C.E. - carved into the temple roofs of Memphis, Thebes and Luxor. Some even place Mancala among the oldest games in the world, with archaeological evidence reaching back perhaps as far as 6000 B.C.E. in Jordan.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
There is archeological and historical evidence that dates Mancala back to the year 700 AD in East Africa. However, the oldest Mancala boards were found in An Ghazal, Jordan in the floor of a Neolithic dwelling. The board was carved out of limestone bearing a striking resemblance to modern-day Mancala boards.
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.
Most authorities agree that the birthplace of the mancala games lies in the region around the Red Sea. Indeed, boards found at Al-Qurna, Luxor and Karnak, all of which are in Egypt.
It is widely believed that Arab traders brought the game with them when traveling and it quickly spread all over Africa and the world, but it is uncertain to know where the game first originated.
It is played all over Africa with two basic variations. North of the equator they use a “two-rank” board; south of the equator, a “four rank” board is used.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
Several mancala variations made their way over to the Americas and the Caribbean by way of African people taken in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Different versions became more popular in different regions in accordance with the heritage of the people who had brought it over.
The Cape Verdean “Ouril” became more popular in New England for example. A version called “Warra” became more popular in Louisiana and in 1940 a man named Willie Julius Champion Jr. started manufacturing “Kalah” sets after come to believe that they had strong educational value. This version is the one that most Americans are familiar with today as the game “Mancala.”
An Ekoi (Nigerian) board made out of wood and tin.
Gameplay and Rules
Recent studies of mancala rules have given insight into the distribution of mancala. 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.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
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.
Players place the board lengthwise between them. The board starts out with a given number of pieces in each of the smaller bins. In Wari, the board has two rows of six holes. Four counters or seeds are distributed into 1 of the 12 small holes.
On each turn a player selects one of the bins on their side and takes out all of the pieces (stones) in it, and moving along counterclockwise, drops one piece in each bin they cross. In some versions of the games, the seeds in which the player can select from is limited to their side of the board.
The game will end if a player clears all of their stones from their side of the board. The winner is the player with the highest number of stones in their Mancala and any remaining stones on their side of the board.
Sowing
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.
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.
The Indian style laps, which are called pussa-kanawa, are essentially multiple lap games. Instead of scooping up the contents of the last hole, however, the player uses the contents of the next hole to continue with the lap. The lap will end when the last seed sown ends when the seed sown ends up next to a empty hole.
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.
A player may capture a seed from the board on the last lap. There are several variations on how to capture, including what is done with the counters that are captured. In the Wari version, if the last seed sown lands in a cup with exactly one or two of your opponent's pieces in it, then the stones become captured prisoners. The stones are removed from the board and placed in the big storehouse located at either end of the board.
If the preceding cup has two or three stones, then the pieces are captured as well. This capture continues until the player reaches a position where there are not two or three stones located in the cup. An alternative version to capturing includes removing the seeds in any adjacent holes with two or three pieces rather then the preceding cup.
To win: To end with more pieces in your base than your opponent.
Equipment and Board Configurations
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".
The boards for these games consist of a number of rows, each containing a number of cups. These are sometime made of wood, but just as often cut into stone, or simply pressed into the dry earth. The number of rows can be two, three or four, and the number of cups also varies from as few as three for simple children’s games to as many as 28 for several of the more complex games. Small objects such as beans, seeds or nuts, are arranged in various ways in the cups. There is no differentiation between those pieces.
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.
Stones, seeds, shells or any similar object that is easy to handle and distribute into the cups.
Cultural Significance and Symbolism
Although mancala games have educational value in teaching arithmetic skills, some places forbid boys or girls from playing. For example, The Wolof of Senegal traditionally forbid non-initiated boys from playing.
It’s thought to have an influence on the sex of unborn children, so the Baule women of Ivory Coast play a special variant of the mancala game in hopes of influencing their child’s development. Playing with a girl will increase the odds of the baby being born female, playing against a boy will inversely make it more likely their baby will be male.
The number of pieces used to play is very symbolic. Mancala also takes on a metaphorical meaning. The board often represents a village and each hole is a “hut”. Different combinations of seeds in play represent different aspects of village life.
In the Western region of Africa, the land of the dead and ancestors is also widely thought to lie somewhere to the west. The mancala board is to be positioned to align with the east-west axis, with players sitting to the north and south. The movement of the seeds during the game goes from left (feminine symbol) to right (masculine symbol), from the west to the east.
Spirits and Nighttime Play
Nighttime brings out the spirits. At night mancala players leave their game boards and pieces outside for the spirits’ entertainment. Anyone playing at night takes extreme risks in attracting malicious spirits and offending them with mortal play.
It is believed that an individual’s soul could be stolen, they could be cursed with sickness, their mother could die, if they were to play during the time the spirits are active. During funerary wakes, mancala is played at night in Dahomey, for example.
The Alladian and Baule peoples of Ivory Coast also used this game at night and behind closed doors to determine who would be the next chief. The nighttime spirits of the ancestors would participate in this “electoral combat”, influencing their preferred candidate to win, giving their seal of approval to the new chief through the result of one or several games.
Strategies
Vulnerability: If you leave one of your cups with just two stones in it, then it is susceptible to attack by the opposition. In order to defend against this, the player should do one of three things: empty the cup, add a piece to the vulnerable cup by emptying another cup, or add a stone to the opponent's cup that is endangering your cup.
A player should also try not to have empty cups, which although is less vulnerable to attack then having two stones is still an easy target. A piece may be dropped into the empty cup so that on the next round it can be taken prisoner.
Variants
- 12 Stones: If a player empties a cup that has 12 or more counters, leave the cup empty so that the 12th stone is placed in the cup containing the first stone.
- One Stone Left: Leave at least one stone on the opponent's side of the board. The game continues until the player is unable to do so.
Making Your Own Mancala Board
So, you want to play Mancala but you don't have a board? Be sure to save the side that holds the eggs, that will be your game board. To make the end pockets or mancalas, tape together each cut off end and the middle-to-edge pieces. Be sure to tape them facing outward so you have something to tape your board to.
Take the two top pieces and attach them to the bottom of the remaining egg carton piece (side with cups). Attach the top pieces so they stick out enough to be the cups for the Mancala game.
Tape each end pocket to either end of the bottom of the carton, the middle piece facing inward to the board. Now the students are ready to decorate their games. Remind students of the use of symbolism in Mancala to represent agriculture, landscape and harvesting. Have them design their own board with symbols representing important aspects of their own lives, including landscapes they’ve seen or different agricultural types Americans use today.
Once the Mancala boards have dried and are ready to play with, hand out your play pieces - beans, paperclips, etc. - and explain the rules of Mancala to the class. There are many variations on the rules, so feel free to choose a different method of play.
Place the game board between the two players, with the larger cups on the right and left of the players. The side of the board closest to each player, as well as the end cup on each player’s right belongs to that player.
Example: On the first turn of the game, player one picks up the paper clips from the fourth cup from the right. That player would then deposit a paper clip in the third cup from the right, the second cup from the right, and finally, the right-most cup.
The object of the game is to end your turn with all of the cups on your side empty (excluding, of course, your end cups). After the students have played the game, it may be beneficial to hold a show-and-tell session.
Mancala Around the World: Names and Variations
Mancala is a game that dates back to the 6th century AD, and has many different names all over the world. In West Africa it is known as Oware, Warri, Awale, and Awele. In Angola it is called Kiela. In Malawi, the game is called bao, depending on which part of country you are in the game is called oware, ayo, omweso, enkeshui, wari, kiuthi, mefuhva or aweet.
There are in fact more than 200 versions of this "count and capture" game, played throughout Africa, all with slightly different rules. In North and West Africa it's common to use two rows of pits, in Ethiopia they play with 3 rows, and in East and southern Africa, they play with four rows.
Several groups of mancala games have their own tournaments.
Like other board games, mancala games have led to psychological studies.
