Brain Games
All games
Brain Games › Games › Seeds
Seeds
Board · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
You do not move a piece. You pick up everything in one hole and sow it, one seed per hole, round the board. Every turn changes half the position at once, which is why a game played with pebbles is harder to think about than most games played with kings.
Where it comes from
Mancala is not one game, it is a family of hundreds, played across Africa, the Arab world, south and south-east Asia under scores of names — oware, bao, omweso, congkak, sungka. The common ancestor is older than any of them and effectively undatable, for a good reason: the board is a row of holes in the ground and the pieces are seeds. A game that needs no equipment leaves no archaeology.
What survives is stone boards cut into other things. Rows of cups have been found in a Roman bathhouse at Gadara, in modern Israel, dated to the second or third century AD, and in Aksumite remains at Matara and Yeha, in Eritrea and Ethiopia, from the sixth and seventh. Much older claims exist — Neolithic floors with rows of hollows — and they are disputed, because a row of hollows is also just a row of hollows.
The version most Westerners have met is Kalah, put together in the United States by William Julius Champion Jr. in 1940 and sold as an educational toy. It is a simplified member of the family, and it is also a solved one: with the usual setups the first player wins with perfect play.
How to play
| Sowing | Take every seed from one of your holes and drop them one at a time into the following holes, going round. |
|---|---|
| Your store | Seeds dropped into your own store count. You skip your opponent’s. |
| Another turn | End your sowing exactly in your store and you go again. |
| Capturing | End in an empty hole on your side and you take it, and the hole opposite. |
| The end | One side empty. The other player takes what is left. |
Why sowing is hard to think about
In chess you move one thing. Here you change every hole you pass, which means the board after your move looks different everywhere, and the useful calculation is not where does this piece end up but which holes will hold exactly the wrong number afterwards. Players who are good at this game count in cycles, not in positions.
Three things that help
Look for the extra turn first. A sowing that ends in your store is free. Chains of them, taken in the right order, can be very long, and they are the single biggest source of easy points.
Keep your rightmost holes loaded. Seeds close to your store are seeds you can bank. Seeds far from it will cross to his side and feed him.
Starve him. Not sowing into his side at all is often stronger than capturing: if he has nothing to move, the remaining seeds come to you.