The ancient sowing game of pits and seeds — scoop a hollow, sow its seeds around the board, and capture cleverly to fill your store.
Each side of the board has a row of pits and a scoring store. On your turn you scoop all the seeds from one of your pits and drop them one at a time into the following pits, going counter-clockwise. Land your last seed in your own store for another turn, or in an empty pit on your side to capture the seeds opposite. The player with the most seeds in their store at the end wins.
Mancala is not one game but a vast family of 'sowing' games — count-and-capture games played in rows of pits or holes. They are among the oldest and most widespread games on Earth, played across Africa and the Middle East for well over a thousand years and carried along trade routes into Asia. Rows of holes worn into ancient stone survive at many sites, and hundreds of regional variants are still played today, from West Africa to the Swahili coast.
Mancala is a faithful free browser version of the ancient public-domain sowing game played for thousands of years, presented here with the familiar single-capture pit-and-store ruleset against the computer or another person.