Anyone who has come to the Mind Sports Olympiad, or seen the press coverage of the event, will be aware of the wonderful African game of Oware. The large, beautiful, intricately carved boards used in the game, and the friendly atmosphere of the Oware competitions, has been a notable feature of all the Olympiads so far.

What may be rather less well known in Europe and North America are the hundreds of other games from the same family as Oware, the mancala games. These games share the feature that they are played on boards consisting of rows of hollows or cups, into which seeds or similar objects are sown. However, the size of the board and the object of the game may vary considerably - just as bridge and snap are both played with cards, but do not have much else in common!

Mancala games may be among the oldest board games played today. Their origins are unclear - they may have developed in Asia or in Africa, and the board may have originally been used for calculation or for divination. Some say that the game is 3000 years old. Certainly, boards dating back to the sixth century have been found in Zaire, Angola and Ghana.

The games are played not only throughout Africa, but also in the Caribbean, Surinam, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and parts of the former U.S.S.R. However, it is extremely difficult to estimate how many different variants there are. There are well over 200 different names of mancala games. But in some cases the same game will have many different names. And on the other hand it sometimes happens that completely different games have the same name!

Traditional mancala boards come in all different shapes and sizes - some are designed in the shape of fish, boats, dragons, crocodiles or even wheelbarrows! And although the boards are usually wood, other materials used have included metal, pottery, clay, stone and dung. Some wonderful boards are in the collection of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. And there are some more nice pictures of mancala boards on this Traditional Games site of James Masters.

The pieces used are usually the greenish-grey seeds of the shrub Ceasalpinia Bonduc, which are known in Barbados as "horse nickars". In earlier times it was probably more usual to use cowrie shells, and real or plastic cowries are still in use in some places today.

The names of mancala games range from Abalala'e, Abanga and Achara to Yada, Yit nuri and Yovodji. The origins of these names are diverse too. The Liberian name Kpo is an imitation of the noise of the pieces clicking against the board. The Sudanese name Andot means "balls of dung", which were formerly used as pieces. In the Indonesian game of Kedang, each hole on the board is named after a particular body part!

Mancala games have taken a long time to arrive in Europe and North America. Early attempts by Indians to bring mancala games to the Netherlands, and by Syrian immigrants to introduce them to New York, were not successful. But in this century mancala has spread. George V of England had a board, which was presented to him by the King of Uganda. Mancala was mentioned in the book Born Free, where Joy Adamson describes a myth that lions would play, creating the board by making depressions in sandy ground with their paws. And nowadays many toy and game shops in Europe and America stock cheap mancala sets, often aimed at children and keen to point out the benefits of the games in helping to practise counting and arithmetic!

The positive aspects of mancala games are not always so readily appreciated. R.C. Bell describes an English nurse in Uganda who was not pleased to see her patients "dropping nasty little bits of rubbish into rows of horrid little holes." And as recently as 3 June 1998, the Kenyan newspaper The Daily Nation reported that the provincial commissioner of Nyanza, Kenya had had to ban the playing of the mancala game Bao because it was causing local men to be "lazy and unproductive".

Of the hundreds of varieties of mancala, many are played only in a particular small area, or are only intended as a social, rather than competitive activity. In this article I have tried to describe those few games which are relatively widespread, well known or played at a high level. Oware board from Ghana. Picture reproduced by kind permission of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Mancala games are usually played on wooden boards with rows of cups or holes which contain seeds or similar pieces. In most games, there are 2, 3 or 4 rows of holes. There are generally two players, and the board is placed so that the rows of holes run from left to right (not up and down) as each player looks at the board.

The West African game Oware uses a board with two rows of holes, so it is often referred to as a form of "two-rank mancala". The East African games of Bao and Omweso are examples of four-rank mancala. Each player may also have a larger hole which acts as a store for captured pieces. There is a generally a fixed arrangement at the start of the game as to how many seeds there should be in each hole, although in some games each player can choose the starting arrangement on their side of the board.

The usual way that a move is carried out is this. A player lifts all the seeds from one of the holes on their own side of the board, and they sow them one by one into the other holes. They start by putting a single seed in the hole next to the one they have just emptied. Then one seed goes in the hole next to that, and so on until all the seeds are used up. In some games the sowing is always clockwise, in some counter-clockwise, and some games feature sowing in both directions. In two-rank mancala games, the seeds will generally be sown round the whole of the board. In four-rank games, the rule is usually that a player sows seeds round their own side (nearest two rows) of the board only.

The store holes, in many games, do not have seeds sown into them during the course of a move. But in other games, the player's own store hole (but not the opponent's) is part of the circuit when they are sowing the seeds. However, it is not allowed to sow seeds out of a store hole. Often there is no other restriction on which of their holes a player starts sowing from; but in some games there are extra rules, for example that the hole must contain at least two seeds, or it must be in an inner row (if the board is a four-row one).

In some games, called "single-lap games", the move ends after the seeds from one hole have been sown, and any resulting captures have been made. In others, sowing the seeds from one hole may lead to another sowing by the same player and so on. The most usual arrangement is that the player will get to carry on if the last seed falls into a hole which already had seeds in it. In this case the player may pick up all these seeds and sow them, in the same direction as the original sowing. Some four-rank mancala games have a different mechanism, used for sowing captured seeds back into the board.

Different games have different ways of capturing seeds. Often these relate to the number of seeds in the hole where the sowing ends, or to the number of seeds in the hole opposite to that one. In two-rank mancala games, captures are usually taken and put in the player's store hole. In four-rank games, a capture often involves taking seeds from the opponent's side of the board and sowing them in one's own.

There are some technical differences in how the sowing works in different games. For example, there is the question of what happens if the player is sowing a lot of seeds and comes all the way round to the hole that has just been emptied. In some games, a seed is sown into this hole, in others it is skipped.

Games also have special rules about situations where a player has no legal moves. Sometimes a player must avoid leaving the opponent in this situation if at all possible.

Finally, there are mancala games where the contest does not usually end after a single game, but after a linked series of games. The starting situation for each game may depend on how many seeds the player captured in the previous one. Of course this leaves scope for a long sequence of games, with fortunes ebbing and flowing between the two players!

This game has also been known as Awari, Warri, Wari, Owari, Awale, Awele and Ayo, to mention just a few names! Different names are used in different places - for example it is called Awale in the Ivory Coast and Aju in Togo and Benin, whereas in Senegal and Cape Verde where the game is also popular it is called Ouri. And the name Oware has been used for other games too. But thanks to the efforts of the Oware Society, the use of the name Oware for this game is becoming more universally recognised, which does help to reduce the confusion.

Oware is played on a board with 2 rows of 6 holes. It is a "single-lap" game, with only one sowing per turn. Pieces are captured in twos and threes when the last seeds of a particular sowing make up these numbers on the enemy side of the board.

A good place to find the rules is this site from Alberta, the Home of Bam-Bam, an Oware program. This site explains some of the variations possible in the rules.

The strongest players, including world champion Trevor Simon, are from Antigua. The standard of play is also high in, for example, Barbados, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

Information on the game in Barbados, where it is called Warri, is on this Barbados Warri site. Apparently the strongest players meet 6 days a week in a shop just east of Speightstown. There is more about Warri in Barbados on Patty Hardy's site.

A relatively strong program is Awale from the Guillion Brothers, whose site also has lots of good links on mancala games. As well as having four different playing levels for playing Oware, Awale can also play according to various other rules sets. It has good graphics and the seeds make a pleasing click as they go into the cups, which is realistically sharper when the cup is empty! There is also some splendid background music, which can be a bit distracting when you are trying to play. But Oware is not a game which is traditionally played in silence!

I have rarely beaten the Awale program at its top level. Trevor Simon tells me that its endgame is weak, and that it should be easy to beat - you just have to play defensively at the beginning. Next time I meet him I must ask what playing defensively consists of!

Another program, which is available as freeware and is fun to play, is Oware!, by Roger Kovach.

A wonderful resource for anyone studying Oware is the Awari Endgame Database. This can calculate the result perfectly for all positions with 33 seeds or less. In any of these positions, the outcome is shown for each possible move, assuming optimal play from there on. So you can replay your games against Awale and see where you went wrong - so long as you weren't already dead out of the opening!

There is a book available in English which contains hints on Oware strategy. It is called How to Play Warri and was written by David Chamberlin.

The competition at the Mind Sports Olympiad in London in August featured the current World Champion, Trevor Simon from Antigua. There was also a very strong performance from Demis Hassabis, all-round gamester and Pentamind winner, who was new to the game but still managed to get the bronze medal:

Trevor Simon was the winner also in 1998, when Kambui Charles and Pumpkin Lewis, both also from Antigua, took silver and bronze. And in 1997, the winner was Sakile Richards from Antigua followed by Ian Pacquette of Guadaloupe and Kofi Bonsu of Ghana.

Anyone who wants to know more about Oware should contact the Oware Society. By joining this organisation you can get a regular newsletter, news of forthcoming events, and details of tournament results from around the world.

Warri board from Antigua. Picture reproduced by kind permission of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Bao is famous as the most complex of all mancala games. It is played on a board with 4 rows of 8 holes, and is a "multi-lap" game with several sowings on each turn. When the last seed on a sowing falls in an occupied hole in your inner row (the second row from you), you capture all the seeds from the inner row opposite (third row from you). The object is to deprive the opponent of moves by denuding his inner row of seeds.

One of the holes on each side of the board is a different shape - square instead of round. In Tanzania it is called the nyumba and in Malawi the kuu. There are special rules relating to this hole, and they help to give the game an extra dimension.

The Game Cabinet site has a listing of the rules.

Alexander de Voogt from Leiden University has studied the Bao masters of East Africa, who play this challenging game in tournaments at a very high level. He describes a player who, amazingly, played 44 moves of a game blindfold. This is a considerable feat considering that the amount of change on the board each move is very great, much more so than in a game like Chess where a single piece moves.

In 1994 Dr de Voogt organised a special Bao tournament in Tanzania, which was won by the master player Maulidi, then aged 26 from Stone Town in Zanzibar.

This is Dr de Voogt's summary of his excellent book Limits of the Mind about the Bao masters.

There is a picture of an ancient Bao board on the very attractive site of the Sukuma Museum in Tanzania. And a picture of Bawo being played in Malawi on this Games Page from the Abwenzi African Studies site.

The strongest players are in the Zanzibar area of Tanzania. The game is also extremely popular in Malawi, where it is often called Bawo. And it is also played in Zambia, Ethiopia and Kenya. There are some variations in the rules - according to Alexander de Voogt, the rules are not fully formalised for all possible rare situations, and uncertainties sometimes have to be resolved by a consensus of the Bao masters.

In Tanzania, Bao is organised by the Chama cha Bao (Bao Society) which was founded in 1966. In Malawi there is a national Bawo league, which has been sponsored by South African Airways. And the game is played everywhere as a pastime.

Bao playing programs are available from the sites of Peter Nyasulu and Barry Fairburn.

Congklak and Dakon are the Indonesian names for a mancala game which is also played in Malaysia under the name of Congkak, and in the Philippines where it is called Sungka. There are small variations in the rules between the three countries.

Boards have two rows of holes, but the length of the rows varies. 7 appears to be most usual, but all sizes from 5 to 10 are possible. The number of seeds per hole at the start usually corresponds to the number of holes in each row.

Congklak is a "multi-lap" game, with several sowings on each turn. When the last seed of a sowing falls into an empty hole on your own side of the board, you capture any seeds in the hole opposite.

On this Indonesian site for expatriates living in the country, there is some information about the history of the game. And from Sasmito Adibowo's page, you can download his program Dakon Master.

As I can't find a site with the rules of Congklak, I shall give them here. The first diagram shows the position at the start of the game, with 7 seeds in each hole and nothing in each store. Play is in a clockwise direction, and each player's store hole is on their left.

The player begins by picking up the seeds in any hole on their side of the board and sowing them clockwise (see the General Rules section). The player's own store is part of the circuit for sowing the seeds, but the opponent's store is not.

If the last seed of the sowing falls into an occupied hole (on either side of the board) which is not the player's store, then the player takes the seeds from that hole, including the one which has just landed in it, and sows them clockwise in the same way.

The turn can end in four ways:

• If the last seed falls into the player's own store, then the turn ends, but the player immediately takes another turn - again starting from any hole on their own side of the board.
• If the last seed falls into an empty hole on the opponent's side of the board, the turn ends and it is now the opponent's turn.
• If the last seed falls into an empty hole on the player's own side of the board, with the opposite hole empty, then the turn ends and it is now the opponent's turn.
• If the last seed falls into an empty hole on the player's own side of the board, and the opposite hole has seeds, then the player captures these seeds plus the final one they have just sown; the captured seeds are put in the store, and it is then the opponent's turn.

So from the starting position, suppose the player at the bottom sows from the second hole on the right. Then this position will occur, with the last seed just sown in the top left hole ...

... and then the same player carries on sowing from that hole, to give this position, with the last seed just dropped into an empty hole ...

... so then this seed and the 8 opposite are captured and put in the store to give the position below. It is now the top player's turn.

If a player has no seeds on their side of the board when it is their turn, then they must pass. The game ends when all the seeds have been captured by one player or the other. In some versions of the game, the players can now count up and see who has won. In other versions, a second game starts, but the player who captured fewer seeds can't use all the holes on their side of the board. Starting from the left, they fill as many holes as they can with 7 each of their captured seeds. The other holes on that side of the board are out of play.

In this situation, the other player fills all their holes with 7 seeds each. Spare seeds are put in the store of the player who captured them. Another game then starts, with the player who played second last time making the first move.

So if in game 1 the bottom player captured 72 seeds and the top player 26, then the second game would start with the position below. The four empty holes should be covered and excluded from the game.

The series of games continues in this way until eventually one player captures fewer than 7 seeds in a game - then they have lost.

This is a traditional Omweso board. These have rectangular holes, do not fold, and have a handle for hanging up when not in use. Omweso board from Uganda. Picture reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holder Brian Wernham of the International Omweso Society.

Omweso is the national game of Uganda. It is a four-rank mancala game, with 8 holes in each row, and it is a "multi-lap" game with the possibility of several sowings on each move. If the last seed falls in an occupied hole in your inner row (second row from you), and the two holes opposite both contain seeds, then you capture all of these seeds. Seeds captured from the opponent are immediately sown into your own side of the board. There are various ways to win, but the basic idea is to capture seeds and deprive the opponent of moves.

The best place to find out information about Omweso, including the rules and information about competitions, is from the International Omweso Society. The society organised a tournament of over 70 players in Kampala in November 1999, and an even larger event is planned for 2000.

A very similar mancala game called Igisoro is played in Rwanda.

The usual seeds used for playing Omweso are the small black seeds from the Omiyuki tree. When the seed pods of this tree are ripe, they are said to smell exactly like buttered toast with strawberry jam!

This is the game which most frequently appears in computerised versions that I have seen on the Web. Software is available under the names Kalah, Kalaha, Makalah and Mancala. The game is played on a board of 2 rows of 6 holes, with one sowing only per move. Captures are made when the last seed of a sowing falls into an empty hole on your own side of the board and there is an occupied hole opposite. There are different starting positions with 3, 4 or 6 seeds per cup, but otherwise the rules always appear to be the same.

Usually the game is claimed to be very old, and either from Africa or Asia - one program I have seen says that it has been around for 7000 years! Another claims that the game is traditionally played with diamonds.

Kalah appeared as a commercial game in the USA in the 1950's, marketed by the Kalah Game Company of Holbrook, Massachusetts. More information about this is on the Kalah section of the University of Waterloo pages and in this 1963 newspaper reprint on the same site. It is not clear whether Kalah was supposed to be a new mancala game or a revival of an old one. I haven't been able to find a game with these rules in any of the literature on traditional mancala games. It looks like a simplified version - each move restricted to one sowing only - of the Asian game Congkak/Dakon/Sungka. Perhaps it is in fact a modern invention.

Here is an example Java Program which plays the 6-seed version, and has with it a full copy of the rules.

There are a huge variety of other mancala games. These include a whole series, including Ba-awa from Ghana, which involve sowing seeds in multiple laps and capturing them in fours. Games like this are often described in mancala sets on sale in the West. A further example of this type of game is Adi, from Nigeria. A description and full rules for Adi can be found on this Adi page of the University of Waterloo site.

Another set of games is played on boards with three rows of holes. These games are mostly found in Ethiopia and Eritrea. A two-row version of mancala played in these countries is featured in the very nice children's book Trouble by Jane Kurtz. Both the two-row and three-row games are usually called Gabata or Gebeta.

In South Africa, there is Moraba-raba, which comes in 3 different versions. Sandile Mtshiki, head of the company Traditional Games of Africa would like to popularise the game further with national championships and a schools' Olympiad. His company sells traditional African games which are made by the Johannesburg Society for the Blind.

This large object is a mahogany table from Sri Lanka used to play the game of Olinda Kaliya. The seeds are pretty big too! The game is normally played on a much smaller board using scarlet seeds from the olinda bush. Olinda Kaliya table from Sri Lanka. Picture reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holder James Masters from the Mancala section of his traditional games site.

And there are modern versions of mancala which have been invented in the last few decades. One of these is the game of Cups by Arthur and Wald Amberstone, described in Sid Sackson's superb book A Gamut of Games. Others are the excellent Glass Bead Game and Mini Mancala by Christian Freeling. And there is also Oh-Wah-Ree by the great games inventor Alex Randolph. It will be interesting to see if these fascinating and innovative variants can stand the test of time like Bao and Oware.

• Board and Table Games of Many Civilisations, R.C.Bell, OUP 1960
• Discovering Old Board Games, R.C.Bell, Shire 1973
• How to Play Warri, David Chamberlin, Chamberlin 1984
• The Complete Mancala Games Book, Larry Russ, Marlowe 1999
• Mancala Board Games, Alexander de Voogt, British Museum Press 1997
• Limits of the Mind, Alexander de Voogt, CNWS Publications 1995
• A Gamut of Games, Sid Sackson, Nelson 1969