Mancala

Play the classic seed-sowing board game with standard Kalah rules. Pick a pit, sow its seeds counter-clockwise, land in your store for an extra turn and capture your opponent's seeds to win.

How to use the Mancala

1. Choose a mode. Play vs Computer and pick a difficulty, or choose 2 players to play a friend on one device.
2. Pick a pit. Your pits are the bottom row. Click one (or press 1-6, left to right) to pick up all its seeds.
3. Sow the seeds. They are dropped one by one counter-clockwise into the next pits and your store on the right, skipping your opponent's store.
4. Use the special moves. If your last seed lands in your store you play again. If it lands in an empty pit on your side, you capture it plus the seeds in the opposite pit.
5. Win the game. When one side runs out of seeds, the other player banks the rest. The player with more seeds in their store wins.

Mancala (Kalah) rules at a glance

Mancala strategy tips

• Count to your store. A pit is an extra-turn move when its seed count equals its distance to your store. On the standard board, a pit with 6 seeds in your leftmost pit, or 1 seed in the pit next to your store, lands exactly in the store.
• Chain extra turns. Play the pit closest to your store first. Emptying it often makes another pit line up exactly, so you can take two or three turns in a row.
• Watch for captures both ways. Before every move, look for empty pits on your opponent's side across from your big piles. Those piles are the ones they can steal.
• Hoard on the right. Seeds in the pits nearest your store are hard for your opponent to reach and will end up in your store when the game ends.
• Starve your opponent late. In the endgame, keeping seeds on your side and forcing your opponent to run out ends the game while you still hold the remainder.

How the computer plays

The computer tries every legal move and looks ahead with minimax search and alpha-beta pruning, treating extra turns as consecutive moves by the same player. Positions at the end of the search are scored by the difference between the two stores, with a small bonus for seeds on its own side. Easy searches two moves ahead and plays a random move about a third of the time. Medium searches six moves ahead. Hard deepens the search step by step for almost a second, which in most positions reaches well beyond the Medium depth.

Frequently asked questions

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