The game of Mancala.
The name "mancala" applies to a family of games in which the playing board consists of two, three, or four straight rows of deep, round holes. The holes, which are used to hold the playing pieces, are what distinguishes this game from other board games. The word mancala (or Manqala) is derived from the Arabic word naqala, to move.Beating a path to Africa
The timeframe for mancala's penetration into Africa is not known, and may or may not have preceded
the arrival of Islam. It goes by many names in different African countries, but wari is the most
prevalent. In 1896, a western chronicler of games named Stewart Culin called mancala the "national
game of Africa."
"Africanized" mancala is a spectator sport. Onlookers discuss strategy, dole out advice to (and sometimes
interfere with) the primary players. To many western observers this lent a tribal atmosphere to game
proceedings. (To modern Americans, it just sounds like ice hockey!)
Westward ho!
Mancala never gained much of a foothold in the non-Islamic parts of Europe. The game did, however, cross
the Atlantic with the African slaves, landing first in the West Indies.
Before its arrival in the west, mancala was mostly a secular activity. In Dutch Guiana (northern Brazil)
and the West Indies it took on some spiritual overtones. M.J. Herskovitz, an anthropologist, wrote,
"It is the game which is played in the House of Mourning to amuse the spirit whose body is awaiting burial."
Apparently, the Dutch Guianese didn't want too much communion with the dead person; they kept a few
different-sized boards on hand, and played on the type most disliked by the deceased!
Regional incarnations
Though six and seven cups per row is most common, the number of cups differs from place to place.
Children imitate the adults by playing mancala games with only two or three holes in each row. Some
regions (especially in Africa) use mancala boards with up to 28 cup-holes per side. One type of mancala
game, with up to three and four rows of six (or more) cups each and only two beans per cup, is common in
eastern and southern Africa. A greater quantity of holes requires more playing pieces and more time to
finish a game.
In West Africa, as in Syria and Egypt, mancala did not cross gender lines: men played with other men,
and women played with women. In most Asian countries and the Philippines, men usually don't play the
game at all.
Mancala might be played on a hinged board, as Thevenot reported, or dug right out of the ground.
Non-hinged boards usually had two extra receptacles for storing captured pieces. The extra receptacles
are especially common in the far east (southern China, Indonesia, and the Philippines).
Playing pieces are beans, seeds, berries, stones, or anything convenient. Play is normally counterclockwise.
However, in some areas the first player determines the direction of sowing (i.e., piece distribution).
Some regional variations include the following rule: if the last piece is sown on a player's own side,
that cup is immediately lifted and sown into the other cups. Rules for capture also differ greatly from
place to place.
In some circles, cheating is commonplace, and in fact the player is highly regarded who can cheat without
being detected. In one place, recorded by Murray, this inspired a corresponding rule that players sowing
must keep their hands high above the board, so their moves could be monitored closely by the opponent.
Game rules
If you are seated in the top position, the tall cup on the top is your mancala and the cups on the left
are yours. Use what you prefer to determine which player goes first. Choose one of your cups to start
play with.
The stones from the cup you choose are distributed counter-clockwise around the board. Stones you play
are dropped in your mancala but not in your opponent's manacala.
If the last stone from the choosen cup drops into your mancala, you get to play again. This can repeat
as many times as you continue to play cups that end at your mancala.
If the last stone from the choosen cup drops into one of your empty cups, that stone plus all stones in
the opponent's cup directly across the board go into your mancala.
When one player's cups are empty, any stones left in the opponent's cups are put into the opponent's
mancala and the game ends. The player with the larger mancala wins.
© Paolo Botton | Previous Page |