Bohnenspiel
Game type: Two-player two-row mancala with stores; 2×6 board with single-lap counter-clockwise sowing; backward-chaining captures of pits reaching even counts of two, four, or six seeds on either row.
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Overview
Bohnenspiel ("The Bean Game") is a classic German mancala game popularized in the early 20th century by Pastor Fritz Jahn (1863–1931) of the Züllchow institutions near Stettin (Szczecin), who championed it as an educational folk pastime in 1908. During the 19th century, the game flourished among Baltic German aristocrats residing in the Baltic governorates of the Russian Empire (modern Estonia and Latvia). It was often referred to as Baltisches Bohnenspiel ("Baltic Bean Game") or Kardis-Bohnenspiel, taking its name from the historic Kardis estate (Kärde) where the 1661 Russo-Swedish peace treaty was concluded.
Scholars trace Bohnenspiel's introduction to Saint Petersburg, where it arrived from Ottoman and Persian trading contacts, before migrating west into Livonia, East Prussia, and across Central Europe. While its rules mirror those of Ottoman Turkish Mangala, Bohnenspiel carved out its own unique literary and gaming identity, maintaining steady appeal through the 20th century. In East Germany (GDR), it was commercially manufactured and marketed as a popular tabletop game under the title Badari.
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 6
- Stores: Two (one score receptacle per player, traditionally located at the player's right-hand edge, termed the Schatzhöhle or "treasure cave")
- Seeds per hole at start: 6 beans
- Total seeds: 72 beans
- The stores do not participate in active sowing; they serve solely as repositories for captured beans.
How to Play
- Players alternate turns. On their turn, a player lifts all beans from any non-empty pit on their side of the board and sows them counter-clockwise, depositing one bean per pit into successive holes.
- Sowing is strictly single-lap; turns conclude once the hand is exhausted.
- Seeds are sown only into active board pits, bypassing the score stores.
Capturing
- If the final bean dropped during a sow lands in any hole—on either player's side—and brings the hole's total contents to an even count of two, four, or six beans, those beans are immediately captured and placed into the active player's Schatzhöhle.
- The capture extends backward against the sowing path: if the pit immediately preceding the landing hole also holds two, four, or six beans, its contents are captured as well. This chain continues backward through any unbroken sequence of pits meeting the even-count criterion.
- A pit holding any odd number of beans, or more than six beans, breaks the capture chain.
End of Game and Winning
- The game terminates when the player whose turn it is cannot make a legal move because all holes on their side are empty.
- All beans remaining on the board are swept up and awarded to the player who made the final move.
- The player who has gathered the majority of beans (more than 36) wins the match. A tie of 36–36 is declared a draw.
- Match play (Partie) can be contested across multiple rounds, with the overall victory going to the first competitor to reach a cumulative total of 100 points.
Notes
- Statistical analysis of recorded games reveals an average match duration of 41 moves (typically ranging between 28 and 65 turns). The recorded extremes span from a 27-move miniature to a 91-move marathon, with approximately 6% of games ending in balanced draws.
- Standard notation designates the pits numbered 1 through 12 in counter-clockwise order, beginning with the leftmost hole of the opening player.
- The game has found enthusiastic study in Central Europe and Central Asia: international tournaments took place in Pardubice (Czech Republic) in 2012 and Nürnberg (Germany) in 2013, while in Kazakhstan, Toguz Kumalak grandmaster Maksat Shotayev composed renowned Bohnenspiel endgame puzzles.
- In 1926, pedagogue K. Hemprich recorded an endgame variant in which play continues until every bean has been captured from the board, requiring an immobilized player to pass until new beans are sown into their pits.
- Historical records note a 19th-century East Prussian variant called Deutsches Bohnenspiel, contested on an expanded 2×9 board layout, though its detailed mechanics remain unrecorded.
Source: Mancala World – Bohnenspiel