Mancala

One of my favorite moments when thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail a few years ago was coming up to a shelter and finding two young girls camping with their parents who had made a mancala board by outlining the pits with sticks and using pine cone scales for the seeds. I love how simple the game is, and how easy it is to create a board anywhere!

Ayoayo is a game in the Mancala family in West Africa. I grew up playing it and always thought it was a local game (Nigerian). It is kind of amazing how this game or style of gaming spread all over the world and is part of many cultures. Its funny because many Nigerians think nothing of the game, it is just an old game you pick up when you are a child, kinda like hop scotch or checkers. I actually never knew it was this ancient of a game.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ayoayo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ayoayo</a>

One of my early contributions to Debian was packaging an X11 version of mancala, it is still available today. I think there is also an implementation in KDE.

I really love mancala. It’s one of my favorite games. However, I hate that most sets I’ve seen come with 3 stones or 4 stones per slot — for competitive play to be effective I’ve found starting with 7 stones per slot to make the game more “fair” between the person who goes 1st and the person who moves second.

Weird, the same picture is used for another game (bao) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bao_(game)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bao_(game)</a>

There&#x27;s a version of Mancala included in the Clubhouse Games collection for the Nintendo Switch. At first I didn&#x27;t get it, but now it&#x27;s one of the more popular games in my home.

Highly recommend this talk on the (truncated) history of board games, including Mancala! I got lost down the rabbit hole of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taikyoku_shogi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taikyoku_shogi</a> for quite awhile.

Surprised that the Wikipedia page doesn&#x27;t mention how Club Penguin (Flash social meetup game for young kids and teens) re-popularised mancala in the Western world. It was a <i>big</i> deal, not sure if the HN crowd&#x27;s young enough to remember.

One of my first programming projects in college was implementing a reasonably simple A&#x2F;B tree solver for Mancala, and then parallelizing it to search with multiple threads. Fond memories!

Just bought my 7 yo daughter a mancala set for her birthday. She&#x27;s absolutely obsessed (fortunately I love it too so she always has someone to play against!)

It is still unclear to me how this game is played.