Mancala | Hacker News Reader

Mancala

en.wikipedia.org

45 pointsshabda19 comments

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayoayo

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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(game)

Bao is a mancala.

> Bao is a traditional mancala board game

There's a version of Mancala included in the Clubhouse Games collection for the Nintendo Switch. At first I didn't get it, but now it's one of the more popular games in my home.

Used to play it on my Nokia 3310.

Highly recommend this talk on the (truncated) history of board games, including Mancala! I got lost down the rabbit hole of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikyoku_shogi for quite awhile.

Sorry, could I ask which talk you are referring to?

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

Club Penguin released in 2005 and I recall playing Mancala games at least as early as 2000 on PC. Are you sure Club Penguin was actually a cause?

In the mid 90s I got a Mancala board, it seemed pretty popular even then.

One of my first programming projects in college was implementing a reasonably simple A/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's absolutely obsessed (fortunately I love it too so she always has someone to play against!)

Yes it’s strangely addictive. There are some nice apps out there

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

You won't learn it from that page as each variant has its own rules (board size, capture rules, etc.).

Here's a specific version and the rules for it [0]. I believe this is the version I learned many years ago. I have a recollection of a Mancala-type game from my childhood, but nothing strong enough to identify the specific version, probably this one though. Then a friend in college was very into it and we'd play this one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah

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