#Mancala playing pieces full#
#Mancala playing pieces free#

This is done by emptying a hole of seeds and dropping one seed in each house in a circle around the playing field, until you’ve run out of seeds in hand. You score points by getting seeds, one house at a time, over to your store. The general idea of most mancala games is that you fill each divot with a number of seeds, equal for both players, and the goal is to end the game with the most seeds in your side’s bin, called your store. The divots are usually called pits or houses. Ancient mancala boards were often carved into stone or just dug into the ground. The basis for mancala is a board made of numerous divots to place little pieces in - pebbles, coloured stones, gems or beads, or even beans, marbles or shells - referred to as seeds. Mancala itself is Arabic for “to move”, stemming from the root word naqala. Mancala is technically a classification of a type of game, rather than a single game.

Like backgammon, it’s likely that what we call mancala originated even earlier than that. Image: TheUjulala/PixabayĪnother traditional two-player game reportedly first recorded in the Israeli city of Gedera, dating back to the second century. Plant the seeds of fun with this ancient game Mancala is a genre of traditional board games rather than a single game. Great to occupy some bored kids on a day with poor weather. You can even make your own backgammon board with a piece of cardboard and a marker, 30 chequers and a pair of six-sided dice. Backgammon can take anywhere from five or ten minutes to possibly hours if each player plays aggressively and keeps capturing each other’s pieces.

But to keep things from getting too predictable, the dice add an element of luck to the game. There is a tactical aspect to moving your pieces in the right order, keeping them protected from your opponent’s attempts to capture them - sending them back to the start - or even deciding when to take an opponent’s pieces. The ultimate goal is to roll a pair of dice and move the checkers from their starting points until they are all on your own quarter of the board, then bear them off - meaning to get them all into your container off the board. In backgammon each player has 15 checker pieces that move between twenty-four points, twelve on each side of the board. Backgammon is a game for two players played on a board that often folds up to hold all the pieces inside it - very useful for saving space. Image: Steve Buissinne/Pixabayīelieved to have originally debuted in Persia in the sixth century, the traditional backgammon is one of the first dice-based table games to be played in the known world. This Persian game has a mechanic called 'dancing', how can that not be fun?īackgammon has remained a popular two-player board game for centuries. Here are some of the best traditional board games that are well worth tracking down and playing. Even if it takes a bit of effort, they’re worth it. Between numerous online locations, reprints at your local gaming store, or even an antique board and pieces from a second-hand store - you should be able to find most of these pretty easily. If you haven’t taken the time to play some of these older titles, then now may be the time to do so. Well, we’ve got good news for you, because board games have been around for literally thousands of years.

But what if you still want a great traditional board game, you’re just not looking for something as complex as chess or don’t want to break into the annual Christmas fistfight over Mayfair?

If you always play from any hole that ends on your mancala, you will not only score lots of points and get extra moves, but you will also avoid having so many stones build up in a hole on your side that you have to play them onto your opponent's side.When people think of traditional board games, most folks would naturally turn their mind’s eye toward such games as chess or Monopoly.

#Mancala playing pieces free#

Unless it ruins your chance at a capture, it is often a good move to take a free point and then move again.

Look for opportunities to score a quick mancala and then take an extra move.

If you can make your opponent run out of stones first, this assures that every stone which lands on that spot will be yours at the end of the game.

If you are not playing with the capture rule, a simple strategy is to pick a hole on your side of the board and never play any stones from it.

#Mancala playing pieces full#

If one of your holes filled with stones is threatened, your next move could either be to fill the empty hole or play the stones from your full hole as a defensive move. You can watch out for this by counting stones in the other holes, to make sure the opponent cannot land a final pebble in that spot. If a final pebble lands there, you can lose all of those stones. If you are playing with the capture rule, be aware of whenever the opponent has an empty hole across from a lot of your stones.