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I spent tonight learning to play Mancala.

Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I spent tonight playing Macala, as learning it only takes about five minutes, after which you’re away (and hooked).

It’s dead simple. You have seven small pits in front of you. Six of these hold small stones - four in each to begin with - that you pick up and drop into other pits in an anti-clockwise direction around the board. Every time you pass your seventh small pit, which is called your reservoir, you drop a stone into it and then continue around the board.

That’s a bit simplistic, as the number of stones you drop depends on how many there were in the pit when you picked them up, and as your opponent can drop stones in your pits it’s changing all the time, but that’s the essence of it.

There is a better explanation of how it works here, and reading through it you can see how easy it would be to make your own board (in many developing countries it is apparently played by scratching holes into the ground and using real stones), but that barely seems worth it when Hamleys is selling boards and stones for just

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2004 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.