Bakuk
Game type: Two-player (or three-player) two-row mancala without stores; 2×3 board with single-lap counter-clockwise sowing; forward-chaining captures of holes reaching two or four stones.
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Overview
Practiced high in the rugged terrain of the Western Rif in northern Morocco, Bakuk is a rustic mancala game played by pastoralists and shepherds in the Jbala region. The Jbala population descends from Amazigh lineages while speaking Moroccan Arabic. Eschewing formal manufactured equipment, players simply scoop small cavities into the earth and gather smooth pebbles or dried goat droppings to serve as counters.
Catalan researcher Víktor Bautista i Roca first documented the game's rules in 2009, having learned them from Anuar, a social worker residing in Catalonia who grew up playing the game in Jbala. Mechanically, Bakuk belongs to a close family of North African pastoral games, most notably Koumma, though it features distinct opening distributions and capture parameters.
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 3
- Stores: None
- Seeds per hole at start: 6
- Total seeds: 36
- In the standard two-player encounter, each participant presides over the three holes on their side of the dirt layout. When three people play, each participant commands a pair of adjacent pits.
How to Play
- Players take turns picking up all counters from any pit under their control and sowing them singly in a counter-clockwise loop, beginning with the adjacent hole.
- Sowing concludes after a single lap once the active hand is emptied.
Capturing
- If the final stone of a turn lands in a pit—on either side of the board—bringing its total contents to exactly two or four counters, those counters are captured and taken off the board.
- If a capture is triggered, the player also collects the contents of subsequent holes along the forward sowing direction, provided they also hold two or four counters in an unbroken chain.
End of Game and Winning
- Play proceeds until moves are exhausted.
- The player who amasses the highest number of captured pieces wins the match.
Notes
- Bakuk is notable for its forward-chaining capture mechanic: unlike mainstream mancala relatives such as Oware, where secondary captures trace backward against the sowing flow, Bakuk sweeps up ripe pits situated ahead of the landing site.
- The game differs from the related Saharan game Koumma in two key aspects: in Koumma, the first distributed counter must be dropped back into the emptied starting hole, and clusters of six counters can also be captured.
Source: Mancala World – Bakuk