# Mancala

> Sowing seeds round a board of pits

- Date: c. 600
- Era: Middle Ages
- Domain: [Textiles & Everyday Life](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/everyday/)
- Rebuild stage: I (Survival)
- Difficulty: 1/5
- URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/mancala/

Mancala is a family of board games played by sowing: a player lifts all the seeds from one pit, drops them one by one into the next pits and captures according to where the last seed falls. Several hundred versions have been described in Africa and Asia. The earliest dated boards that may be mancala come from Matara, in Eritrea, and date from the 6th to the 8th century.

![Mancala · Sowing seeds round a board of pits](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BH4mlLiP_21mIO5.webp)

## Legend

1. Player's row of six pits
2. Opponent's row of six pits
3. Store at the end of the board
4. Seeds used as counters
5. Pit emptied to start a move
6. Path of the sowing, anticlockwise

## What it is

Mancala is the name given to a large family of board games in which counters are sown. The board is a set of cup-shaped pits, most often in two rows and sometimes in three or four, carved in wood, cut in stone or scooped in the ground. The counters are seeds, pebbles or shells. There are no dice and nothing is hidden: once the seeds are laid out, the game depends only on the players' choices.

![A wooden bao board seen at an angle, a long block carved with four rows of eight round pits, grey seeds lying in several of them](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.CGf2a_Yy_8c8tf.webp)
_A bao board from the Swahili coast: four rows of eight pits, two rows for each player._

Several hundred versions have been described. Oware, or awari, played by the Asante of Ghana and in related forms across West Africa and the Caribbean, uses two rows of six pits and 48 seeds. Bao, played on the Swahili coast of East Africa, uses four rows of eight pits, and each player owns two neighbouring rows. Kalah, patented in the United States in 1955, is a two-row game with a store at each end. Boards with three rows of six pits are known only in Ethiopia. A row can hold anywhere from four to fifty pits. The word mancala comes from the Arabic manqala, from the verb naqala, "to move".

## How it works

A move is a sowing. The player chooses one of the pits on their own side, lifts out all its seeds and drops them one at a time into the following pits, always in the same direction. In oware and kalah the direction is anticlockwise, so the seeds run along the player's own row and then on into the opponent's. A pit holding many seeds can carry the sowing right round the board.

![A wooden board with two rows of six pits holding seeds, seen at an angle, and a hand lifting three seeds out of a pit in the far row](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.Cvz5a2sG_2ug9xh.webp)
_In oware, a last seed that makes two or three in an opponent's pit lets the player take them._

Captures depend on where the last seed lands. In oware a player takes the seeds of an opponent's pit when the last seed dropped there makes two or three. In kalah, a last seed that falls into the player's own store earns another turn, and one that lands in an empty pit on the player's side captures the seeds of the pit opposite, which go into the store. Other games use relay sowing. In one game Stewart Culin recorded among Syrian players in the 1890s, the player lifted the contents of the pit where the last seed fell and sowed again, until a last seed reached an empty pit or made a capture.

Skill lies in counting. A player who keeps track of the seeds in each pit can work out where the last seed of every possible move will fall, and in the skilful Syrian game described by Culin players chose their starting pit by this calculation. In 2002 the computer scientists John Romein and Henri Bal computed the best move in each of the 889,063,398,406 positions that can arise in awari under the rules long used for computer play, and found that with perfect play on both sides the game ends in a draw. Jeroen Donkers pointed out that these rules differ from traditional play, as they declare a draw when a position recurs three times and allow a move that captures all of the opponent's seeds, which may change the result for the traditional game.

## How to do it

![A hand dropping a seed into one of twelve holes scooped in two rows of six in firm sand, with a larger hole at each end, more seeds held in the palm and a few already lying in the next holes](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.CmaIl3VO_IeBkA.webp)
_The simplest board: twelve hollows and two stores scooped in sand._

The simplest board needs no tools. Scoop two rows of six hollows in firm sand or earth, each large enough to hold a small handful of seeds, with a larger hollow at each end for captured seeds, and gather 48 seeds, pebbles or shells of about the same size. Players have long made boards this way when travelling or when no board was at hand, and such boards leave nothing for archaeologists to find.

A lasting board can be carved from a block of seasoned hardwood long enough for six pits in a row and a store at each end. Mark the centres of the pits on two parallel lines, evenly spaced. Hollow each pit with a gouge and a mallet, turning the gouge as you go so that the pits come out round and shallow, and cut the two stores larger. Smooth the hollows with abrasive paper wrapped round a fingertip and finish the wood with beeswax.

The abapa rules of oware, used in competition, go as follows. Each player owns the row nearer to them, and every pit starts with four seeds. Players take turns. On each turn, choose one of your own pits, lift all its seeds and sow them anticlockwise, one in each following pit; if the pit held twelve seeds or more, skip it when the sowing comes round, so that it stays empty. If the last seed falls into a pit on your opponent's side and makes two or three seeds there, take them, then take the seeds of the pit before it if it also holds two or three, and so on back along the opponent's row until a pit breaks the chain. A move that would take every seed on the opponent's side captures nothing. When your opponent has no seeds left, you must play a move that gives them some if you can; rule books differ on what happens when no such move exists. The first player to capture 25 seeds wins, and 24 each is a draw.

## History and evolution

Rows of cup-shaped hollows are easy to find in old stone and hard to interpret. In 1992 Gary Rollefson proposed that a limestone slab with two rows of hollows from the Neolithic village of 'Ain Ghazal, in Jordan, was a game board, and the Penn Museum's magazine Expedition presents it as a possible board only. Hollows of this kind can serve other purposes, and many rows of holes on Roman sites belong to the game of five lines, played on two rows of five. Boards scratched on the stones of Egyptian temples cannot be dated by the temple, and the board game scholar Alex de Voogt notes that no Egyptian, Greek or Roman text or picture shows mancala being played.

The earliest dated boards that may be mancala come from Matara, in Eritrea, in the former kingdom of Aksum. The archaeologist Francis Anfray dated a fragment of an earthenware board there to the 6th or 7th century, and two limestone boards with two rows of hollows to between the 6th and the 8th century. Similar boards come from Yeha, in Ethiopia, and from Asmara. Thierry Depaulis takes them as the oldest dated mancala boards and thinks Ethiopia a likely cradle of the game, while de Voogt holds that their identification remains speculative because no other gaming material was found with them. Boards with two rows of seven holes found in Israel may be Byzantine, but they could also be much later.

The name manqala first appears in Arabic writing in the _Kitab al-Aghani_, the Book of Songs compiled in the 10th century. The first explicit rules cited by de Voogt are those of a four-row game in Madagascar, published by Étienne de Flacourt in 1658. Some versions can be dated by trade and travel. Bao is played with the same detailed rules from Kenya to Madagascar, along the Swahili trade routes, and near-identical games link West Africa and the Caribbean through the Atlantic slave trade. De Voogt dates the arrival of the game ohvalhu in the Maldives to before the islands turned to Islam in 1153.

Hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa, such as the !Xõo and the Ju|'hoan, also play mancala. Kalah, sold in the United States from the 1940s, was patented in 1955 by William Champion of Mystic, Connecticut. His board is shaped like a ship's hull, with six pits on each side and a store, called a kalah, at each end.

## Key facts

- Earliest dated boards that may be mancala: Matara (Eritrea), 6th–8th century
- Name: Arabic manqala, from naqala, to move
- Oware set: Two rows of six pits and 48 seeds
- Computer awari with perfect play: A draw under computer rules (Romein and Bal, 2002)

## Requires

- [Stone Tools](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/): The first cutting edge (3.3 million years ago)

## Sources

- [Misconceptions in the History of Mancala Games: Antiquity and Ubiquity](https://doi.org/10.2478/bgs-2021-0001), Alex de Voogt, Board Game Studies Journal 15 (2021)
- [Early Mancala and Tāb Boards Found in Israel (and in Some Other Countries)](https://doi.org/10.2478/bgs-2024-0002), Thierry Depaulis, Board Game Studies Journal 18 (2024)
- [Sowing the Seeds of Competitive Play](https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/?p=23593), Kristen Pearson, Expedition 58 (1), Penn Museum, 2016
- [Mancala, the National Game of Africa (Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1894)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66220), Stewart Culin, Smithsonian Institution; Project Gutenberg
- [Game counter (Kalah), US patent 2,720,362, filed 1951, granted 11 October 1955](https://patents.google.com/patent/US2720362A/en), William J. Champion, United States Patent Office (Google Patents)
- [Oware Board Game](https://lib.ecu.edu/artworks/work/view/179), East Carolina University, African Art Collection
- [Abapa Rules](http://www.oware.org/abapa.asp), The Oware Society
- [How to Play Oware](https://auale.joansala.com/en/how-to-play-oware/), Joan Sala Soler, Aualé
- [Awari is Solved (J. W. Romein and H. E. Bal) and Comments on the Awari Solution (J. Donkers), ICGA Journal 25 (3), 2002](https://icga.org/icga/journal/contents/content25-3.htm), International Computer Games Association
- [Solving the Game of Awari using Parallel Retrograde Analysis](https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2003.1236468), John W. Romein and Henri E. Bal, IEEE Computer 36 (10), 2003
- [Awari (after Romein and Bal, Awari is Solved, ICGA Journal 25 (3), 2002)](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Awari), Chessprogramming wiki
- [Bao (after the work of Alex de Voogt)](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bao), Chessprogramming wiki
- [Woodworking: hazardous substances](https://www.hse.gov.uk/woodworking/hazard.htm), Health and Safety Executive (UK)

Fact-checked on 2026-10-17.

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