
Mancala - shabda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala
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SamWhited
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!

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adim86
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayoayo)

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pabs3
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.

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yial
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.

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pachico
Weird, the same picture is used for another game (bao)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(game)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_\(game\))

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john-radio
Bao is a mancala.

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wan23
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.

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manojlds
Used to play it on my Nokia 3310.

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karlbright
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikyoku_shogi)
for quite awhile.

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

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grenoire
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.

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tgb
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?

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

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c54
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!

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jordanwallwork
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!)

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nigerian1981
Yes it’s strangely addictive. There are some nice apps out there

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

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Jtsummers
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah)

