

HN: Like playing Mancala? Review my new site. It is a side project. - jacktasia
http://mancalatime.com

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jacktasia
Since people seemed to like this non-Flash Go game (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678145> ) I thought I would try and see
if I could get any reviews for my side project Mancala Time. I'll admit I
submitted this (in a very early form) about 3 months ago but no one made any
comments. Thanks.

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michael_dorfman
I thought the implementation looked very nice, although I hadn't played by
those rules before. Well done.

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jacktasia
Thanks for checking it out. Yeah, mancala is a genre of games. This is
actually kalah, but most americans know this version as "mancala." If the site
catches on I plan on adding Oware...which is my guess of the version that you
are used to?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah>

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jcw
Kalah is a simple and somewhat broken game (the first player is heavily
favored).

I would very much like to see Oware or Bao supported, these are much deeper
mancala games. I haven't seen many implementations of Oware (outside of GNU
Aware). The flash/java implementations of Bao also leave a little to be
desired: <http://www.baogame.com/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(mancala_game)>

~~~
jacktasia
True story on Kalah being broken. This is the main reason why I added in the
ability for users to be 2nd player. I will start to work on Oware sometime
soon now that it seems like there is at real interest in it. Thanks.

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dannyr
When I first saw the game, I though it was sungka from the Philippines.

Apparently, they are very similar, if not the same, games.

<http://www.wikimanqala.org/wiki/Sungka>

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jacktasia
I had not heard of that version. Thanks for the link.

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dfield
I like it... maybe you can improve the difficulty of your AIs some?

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jacktasia
Thanks for checking it out. I do plan on improving them by using the list of
moves that I record...I am thinking of making a Robot API or something
too...but it's hard to be motivated to improve them too much when a large
majority of people lose to Rex. This also makes the idea of finding the best
move out of the moves that have occurred flawed (for now anyway) too.

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boredguy8
Rex pretty much prioritizes getting a 'second move'. I've yet to see him
protect against a capture.

~~~
jacktasia
Yeah, all he is capable of doing is finding an extra turn then it's basically
pick one at random. Although, there's a bit of randomness mixed in. There's
about a 1 in 6 chance that he will basically become a higher level robot on a
given turn.

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dpcan
Gotta love these CS 101 C++ projects becoming weekend web apps.

