🌰 Mancala
🎲 Board · 2 playsMancala
Sow the seeds, count the pits, and take the free turns that chain together.
About Mancala
Mancala is one of the oldest counting games in the world, played across Africa and Asia for centuries in dozens of local forms. You lift all the seeds from one of your six pits and drop them one at a time into the pits that follow; land the final seed in your own store and you move again, and finish in one of your own pits that was empty to capture everything sitting opposite it. Every turn is fully calculable — the number of seeds tells you exactly where the last one falls — so the game rewards counting rather than instinct. The strongest players chain several free turns in a row and set up a capture in the same breath, while keeping their own far pits too thin to be worth taking.
How to Play
Pick a pit on your own side and sow its contents, one seed per pit, moving counter-clockwise. A final seed reaching your store earns another turn. A final seed dropping into one of your own empty pits takes the seeds facing it. When one side is empty the game ends and the other player banks their remaining seeds. The larger store wins.
💡 Tips & Strategy
Extra turns are the engine of the game. A move that lands its final stone in your store gives you another go, and chaining several of these in one turn is how large leads are built. Always scan for the chain before the capture.
Work out the arithmetic exactly: a pit with as many stones as its distance to your store ends there. Counting rather than eyeballing turns a vague sense of a good move into a reliable one.
Keep stones on your own side late in the game. When one side empties, the opponent collects everything remaining on theirs — so as the board thins, hoarding is often worth more than a modest capture.
Set up captures by emptying the right pit. Landing your last stone in an empty pit on your side takes the stones opposite, so creating that empty pit a turn in advance is the standard way to win material.