Playing Mancala.
Created on: 2020-02-25
According to Wikipedia:
Mancala is one of the oldest known games to still be widely played today. Mancala is a generic name for a family of two-player turn-based strategy board games played with small stones, beans, or seeds and rows of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface. The objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent's pieces.
I first came to know about this game from TV serial named Blindspot. On season 3 episode 21 one of the actors play this game. A few web search later, I found out two interesting sites:
After learning the basic rules for the Instructables page, I started playing with the bots on the Mancala site. The game, the rules and the strategy is very very simple but playing it can be very tricky. I will try to explaing the game, the rules and the strategy in brief.
Mancala, as Wikipedia says is a two-payer, turn based board game. So we have:
two player who takes turn in giving their move
the board consist of 12 holes and 2 stores
in each hole there are 4 stones/bids/beans so in total we have 48 stones
with capture, where you can capture opponents stones
without capture, where you can't capture opponents stones
There are 3 simple rules for playing Mancala:
We take all the stones from a hole and put one stone on each hole until we are out of stone, going counter clockwise
If the last stone lands on our store, we get a free turn
The player with the max stone at the end of game wins
Special capture rule: in capture mode, in your turn if your stones land on one of your empty hole, all the stones opposite to that hole gets captured and goes to your store.
There are numerous strategy for Mancala. I have played a few time with real players and seen quite a few different strategies. Depending of the 'modes' of the game the strategy may vary but the end goal is always putting as many as possible stones in our own store. Patterns that I have noticed helps accomplish that goal:
In with capture mode, a high risk, high reward pattern is trying to store 8 stones in the right most hole because if the opponent is not careful then he would store many of his stones in his right most hole. If we have 8 stones in our right most hole and our left most whole is empty we can time it perfectly to capture a hefty sum of stones that will give us a huge lead
In with capture mode, always plan carefully to make an empty hole where your opponents stone is getting stored.
In without capture mode, try to move as much stone to store as early as possible.
In both mode, try to keep a stone in the left most hole as moves are one hole jump it would give you a lot of option to tire out the opponent.
The strategies are just repetitive successful patterns and obviously can be broken so just give the game a try and figure out from there.
More: Mancala World