Bosh
Game type: Two-player two-row mancala without stores, 5 holes per row — Indian-style relay sowing; leapfrog pussa captures beyond an empty landing pit; pit closures across successive rounds
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Overview
Bosh is a traditional two-row mancala game played among pastoral communities of the Darod clan in Somalia. French colonial administrator and ethnographer G. Marin first recorded its rules in 1931 during field investigations into Somali pastimes. Played on a compact layout of ten shallow depressions scooped into dry earth, Bosh exhibits structural and ludic parallels with Indian mancala variants like Pachgarhwa and Sat-gol, reflecting centuries of trade, maritime travel, and cultural contact across the Indian Ocean rim.
Board
- Rows: 2
- Holes per row: 5 (10 playing holes total, typically hollowed into the ground)
- Stores: None (captured stones are held in personal reserves)
- Stones per hole at start: 4 (total of 40 counters)
- Each player controls the row of five holes closest to them.
How to Play
- On their turn, a player lifts all stones from any occupied hole on their own side and sows them anti-clockwise, dropping one stone per hole into consecutive pits.
- Sowing proceeds via Indian-style relay laps: upon dropping the last stone of a hand, the player scoops up the entire contents of the immediate next hole and continues sowing in another lap.
- If the hole following the final dropped stone is empty, the sowing lap ends.
- If a player faces their turn with all holes on their side empty and cannot make a legal move, they forfeit all remaining stones on the board to their opponent.
- Multi-round match play: at the start of each new round, players refill their pits with 4 stones each from their captured pool. Any hole that cannot receive a full quota of 4 stones is filled with sand, closed, and omitted from play. Closed holes can be reopened in future rounds if the owner re-accumulates enough stones to fill them.
Capturing
- Empty-hole leap: When a move halts because the hole following the last dropped stone is empty, the player captures the contents of the hole immediately beyond that empty one.
- Double-empty void: If the pit where the player dropped their last stone is succeeded by two consecutive empty holes, no capture occurs and the turn simply concludes.
End of Game and Winning
- A round concludes when an immobilized player forfeits all board stones to their opponent.
- The overarching match is won when a player closes down all of their opponent's holes, reducing the adversary's total supply to fewer than four stones.
Notes
- Bosh provides an important African example of Indian-style relay sowing paired with leapfrog captures, a combination predominantly found in South Asia. Its pit closure mechanics reflect pastoral themes of diminishing resources, where losing pits are sealed with sand until a player can afford to re-stock them.
Source: Mancala World – Bosh