Mancala

Mancala (Arabic: منقلة manqalah) is 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.

According to some experts, the oldest discovered Mancala boards are in 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan in the floor of a Neolithic dwelling as early as ~5,870 BC[1] although this claim has been disputed by others.

[2] More recent and undisputed claims concern artifacts from modern-day Israel in the city of Gedera in an excavated Roman bathhouse where pottery boards and rock cuts that were unearthed dating back to between the 2nd and 3rd century AD.

Among other early evidence of the game are fragments of a pottery board and several rock cuts found in Aksumite areas in Matara (in Eritrea) and Yeha (in Ethiopia), which are dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and 7th centuries AD.

[3] The oldest mention of the game is in the "Kitab al-Aghani" ("Book of Songs") of the 10th-century, attributed to Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani.

[4] The game may have been mentioned by Giyorgis of Segla in his 14th century Geʽez text Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, where he refers to a game called qarqis, a term used in Geʽez to refer to both Gebet'a (mancala) and Sant'araz (modern sent'erazh, Ethiopian chess).

In Estonia, it was once very popular (see "Bohnenspiel"), and likewise in Bosnia (where it is called Ban-Ban and still played today), Serbia, and Greece ("Mandoli", Cyclades).

[7] In western Europe, it never caught on but was documented by Oxford University orientalist Thomas Hyde.

The game was played by enslaved Africans to foster community and develop social skills.

Archeologists may have found evidence of the game Mancala played in Nashville, Tennessee at the Hermitage Plantation.

Equipment is typically a board, constructed of various materials, with a series of holes arranged in rows, usually two or four.

The most minimalistic variants are Nano-Wari and Micro-Wari, created by the Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova.

Multiple laps or relay sowing is a frequent feature of mancala games, although not universal.

Another common way to receive "multiple laps" is when the final seed sown lands in your designated hole.

[18] Some of Restchitzki's results on memory and problem solving have recently been simulated by Fernand Gobet with the CHREST computer model.