Scoop up the stones in one of your pits and drop them round the board one by one. The store on your right is where your points pile up.
An ancient counting game that takes a minute to learn and rewards looking a few moves ahead.
The six pits nearest you are yours, and the big store on your right is your score. Click any of your pits with stones in it.
The stones are dropped one at a time into each pit going counter clockwise, including your own store but skipping your opponent's.
If your last stone lands in your own store, you take another turn, which is how good players string several moves together.
If your last stone lands in an empty pit on your side, you capture it and everything in the pit opposite. The game ends when one side is empty, and the other player banks whatever is left.
Land your last stone exactly in your own store. Chains of extra turns are usually what decides a game.
If your final stone drops into an empty pit on your own side, you take that stone and all the stones in the pit directly opposite.
No, you always skip it. They skip yours in return.
When one player has no stones left on their side. The other player sweeps the remaining stones into their own store, and the bigger store wins.
Mancala is a family of counting games played across Africa and Asia for well over a thousand years, with boards found carved into stone long before anyone wrote the rules down.
This is the version usually called Kalah, with six pits a side and four stones in each. It is the one most people in Europe and America learned on a wooden board.
The opening matters more than it looks. Certain first moves give you two or three extra turns in a row, and working out which ones is most of the game.