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Bao players in Zanzibar

MancalaFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Mankala" redirects here. For a type of cooperative in Finland, see Cooperative.Not to be confused with mandala.

Mancala is a family of board games played around the world,sometimes called "sowing" games, or "count­and­capture"games, which describes the gameplay. The word mancala (منقلة)comes from the Arabic word naqala (نقلة) meaning literally "tomove". No one game exists with the name mancala; the name isa classification or type of game. This word is used in Syria,Lebanon, and Egypt, but is not consistently applied to any onegame.

More than 800 names of traditional mancala games are known,and almost 200 invented games have been described. However,some names denote the same game, while some names are usedfor more than one game.

Some of the most popular mancala games (with regard todistribution area, the numbers of players and tournaments, andpublications) are:

Bao la Kiswahili – widespread along the east coast ofAfrica, and an integral part of Swahili culture; one of themost difficult games to learn because of its rather complexrules;Congkak – close variants in South Asia from the Maldives to the Philippines, known by manydifferent names (e.g. Dakon, Ohvalhu, Sungka[1]);Kalah – a modern game played mostly in the USA (where it is simply known as "Mancala") andEuropeOware (awalé, awélé) – close variants are played in the Caribbean, throughout western Africa, andin immigrant communities in North America and Europe;Toguz korgool or Toguz kumalak – played in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where it is consideredsuperior to chess.

Contents

1 General gameplay1.1 Equipment1.2 Objective1.3 Capturing

2 History3 Psychology4 See also5 References6 Further reading7 External links

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A swan­shaped Malaysian Congkakboard in the National Museum ofMalaysia

A toguz korgool board with balls,Kyrgyzstan

General gameplay

Most mancala games share a common general game play. Players begin by placing a certain number ofseeds, prescribed for the particular game, in each of the pits on the game board. A player may count theirstones to plot the game. A turn consists of removing all seeds from a pit, "sowing" the seeds (placing onein each of the following pits in sequence) and capturing based on the state of board. This leads to theEnglish phrase "count and capture" sometimes used to describe the gameplay. Although the details differgreatly, this general sequence applies to all games.

Equipment

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

Playing pieces are seeds, beans, stones, cowry shells, half­marbles or other small undifferentiated counters that are placedin and transferred about the holes during play.

Board configurations vary among different games but also withinvariations of a given game; for example Endodoi is played onboards from 2×6 to 2×10. The largest are Tchouba(Mozambique) with a board of 160 (4×40) holes requiring 320seeds; and En Gehé (Tanzania), played on longer rows with up to50 pits (a total of 2×50=100) and using 400 seeds. The mostminimalistic variants are Nano­Wari and Micro­Wari, created bythe Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova. The Nano­Wari boardhas eight seeds in just two pits; Micro­Wari has a total of fourseeds in four pits.

With a two­rank board, players usually are considered to controltheir respective sides of the board, although moves often aremade into the opponent's side. With a four­rank board, playerscontrol an inner row and an outer row, and a player's seeds willremain in these closest two rows unless the opponent capturedthem.

Objective

The objective of most two­ and three­row mancala games is to capture more stones than the opponent; infour­row games, one usually seeks to leave the opponent with no legal move or sometimes to capture allcounters 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. Thisselection is often limited to holes on the current player's side of the board, as well as holes with a certainminimum number of seeds.

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Awale players

Pit marks presumed to be ancientGebeta (i.e. mancala) boards in thebase of an Aksumite stele, Axum,Ethiopia

In a process known as sowing, all the seeds from a hole aredropped one­by­one into subsequent holes in a motion wrappingaround the board. Sowing is an apt name for this activity, sincenot only are many games traditionally played with seeds, butplacing seeds one at a time in different holes reflects the physicalact of sowing. If the sowing action stops after dropping the lastseed, the game is considered a single lap game.

Multiple laps or relay sowing is a frequent feature of mancalagames, although not universal. When relay sowing, if the lastseed during sowing lands in an occupied hole, all the contents ofthat hole, including the last sown seed, are immediately re­sownfrom the hole. The process usually will continue until sowing ends in an empty hole. Another commonway to receive "multiple laps" is when the final seed sown lands in your designated hole.

Many games from the Indian subcontinent use pussa kanawa laps. These are like standard multilaps, butinstead of continuing the movement with the contents of the last hole filled, a player continues with thenext hole. A pussakanawa lap move will then end when a lap ends just prior to an empty hole. If a playerends his stone with a point move he gets a "free turn".

Capturing

Depending on the last hole sown in a lap, a player may capture stones from the board. The exactrequirements 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 theboard from stones in specific configurations, or landing in an empty hole adjacent to an opponent's holethat contains one or more pieces.

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

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

History

Among the earliest evidence of the game are fragments of apottery board and several rock cuts found in Aksumite areas inMatara (in Eritrea) and Yeha (in Ethiopia), which are dated byarchaeologists to between the 6th and 7th century AD; the gamemay have been mentioned by Giyorgis of Segla in his 14thcentury Ge'ez text Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, where herefers to a game called qarqis, a term used in Ge'ez to refer toboth Gebet'a (mancala) and Sant'araz (modern sent'erazh,Ethiopian chess).[2] The similarity of some aspects of the game toagricultural activity and the absence of a need for specializedequipment present the intriguing possibility that it could date tothe beginnings of civilization itself; however, there is littleverifiable evidence that the game is older than about 1300 years.Some purported evidence comes from the Kurna temple graffitiin Egypt, as reported by Parker in 1909 and Murray in his A History of Board­Games Other Than Chess.

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However, accurate dating of this graffiti seems to be unavailable, and what designs have been found bymodern scholars generally resemble games common to the Roman world, rather than anything likemancala.

Although the games existed in pockets in Europe—it is recorded as being played as early as the 17thcentury by merchants in England—it has never gained much popularity in most regions, except in theBaltic area, where once it was a very popular game ("Bohnenspiel"), and Bosnia, where it is called Ban­Ban and still played today. Mancala has also been found in Serbia, Greece ("Mandoli", Cyclades) and ina remote castle in southern Germany (Schloss Weikersheim).

The USA has a larger mancala­playing population. A traditional mancala game called Warra was stillplayed in Louisiana in the early 20th century, and a commercial version called Kalah became popular inthe 1940s. In Cape Verde, mancala is known as "ouril". It is played in the Islands and was brought to theUnited States by Cape Verdean immigrants. It is played to this day in Cape Verdean communities inNew England.

Psychology

Like other board games, mancala games have led to psychological studies. Retschitzki has studied thecognitive processes used by awalé players.[3] Some of Restchitzki's results on memory and problemsolving have recently been simulated by Fernand Gobet with the CHREST computer model.[4] De Voogthas studied the psychology of Bao playing.[5]

See also

List of mancala games

References1. In the Philippines, the accent of said word in writing the diacritic mark should have circumflex, sungkâ.2. Pankhurst, Richard (2005). "Gäbäṭa". In Uhlig, Siegbert von. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D–Ha. Wiesbaden:

Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 598. ISBN 3447052384.3. Retschitzki, J. (1990). Stratégies des Joueurs d'Awélé. Paris: Édition L'Harmattan. ISBN 2738406173.4. Gobet, F. (2009). "Using a cognitive architecture for addressing the question of cognitive universals in cross­

cultural psychology: The example of awalé". Journal of Cross­Cultural Psychology 40 (4): 627–648.doi:10.1177/0022022109335186 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2F0022022109335186).

5. Voogt, A. J. de (1995). Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Leiden: CNWSPublications.

Further reading

Erickson, Jeff (1998). "Sowing Games". Games of No Chance(http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/pubs/sowing.html). Cambridge University Press.Russ, Larry (2000). The Complete Mancala Games Book. New York: Marlowe.Townshend, Philip (1979). "African Mankala in Anthropological Perspective". CurrentAnthropology 20 (4): 794–796. doi:10.1086/202380 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F202380).JSTOR 2741688 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2741688).Deledicq, A. & A. Popova (1977). Wari et solo. Le jeu de calcul Africain. Paris: Cedic.Murray, H.J.R. (1952). A History of Board­Games other than Chess. Oxford at the ClarendonPress.

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Wikimedia Commons hasmedia related to Mancala.

Townshend, P. (1982). "Bao (mankala): the Swahili ethic in African idiom". Paideuma 28: 75–191. JSTOR 41409882 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409882).Voogt, A.J. de (1997). Mancala Board Games. British Museum Press: London.

External links

A great introduction from MSO.

(http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/classic/mancala.html)General information on "Count and Capture Games"(http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/VirtualExhibits/countcap/pages/index.html)Mancala, Oware and Bao history and descriptions(http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Mancala.htm)In pictures: Sudan's calculating game (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8635258.stm) BBCAn online version of Mancala (http://www.mathgamesplay.com/board/mancala)

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Categories: Mancala Traditional board games

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