Kisolo

Game type: Four-row mancala (two players) without stores, typically 7 holes per row; pussa kanawa successor relay sowing; compulsory turn-start inner captures and mid-move file seizures.

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Overview

Kisolo (also known as Cisolo in Kasai) is an ancient and esteemed four-row mancala traditional to the Luba, Lulua, and Songye peoples of southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The earliest Western account came from the British naval officer and explorer Verney Lovett Cameron in 1878 during his expedition across equatorial Africa. Closely related to the royal Coro game of Uganda and sharing strategic parallels with diverse East African and Indian mancalas, Kisolo is celebrated for its distinctive pussa kanawa relay mechanic—in which a sowing lap lifts the contents of the hole immediately following the landing pit rather than the landing pit itself. Luba craftspeople frequently sculpted magnificent ceremonial boards featuring carved anthropomorphic figures and protective ancestral motifs, elevating Kisolo from everyday village leisure to an enduring symbol of prestige.

Board

• Ranks/rows: Four
• Holes per row: 7 (the classic 4×7 grid with 28 holes total, though 4×6 layouts are also traditional)
• Stores: None
• Counters at start: 3 seeds (makombo) in every hole (84 counters total on a 4×7 board)
• Territory: Each player exclusively owns the two rows nearest to them.

How to Play

• If a player cannot perform a compulsory capture at the beginning of their turn, they lift all seeds from any friendly hole and sow them one by one counter-clockwise around their own two rows.
• Successor relay (pussa kanawa): Rather than picking up from the pit where the last seed landed, a continuing lap is initiated by scooping up all seeds from the hole immediately following the landing hole, distributing those seeds onward in the same direction.
• Turn conclusion: A move terminates when the hole directly following the final dropped seed is empty.
• Captures can occur both before a sowing begins (turn-start captures) and dynamically during subsequent relay laps.

Capturing

• Turn-start capture (compulsory): If, at the start of a turn, two facing inner-row holes (one from each player) both contain seeds, a capture is mandatory. The player gathers all opposing seeds from that facing inner hole, as well as any seeds located in the outer hole directly behind it in the same column. These captured seeds are sown counter-clockwise across the player's own circuit, with the first seed dropping directly into the player's inner hole that effected the capture. If multiple facing inner pairs contain seeds, the player may freely choose which capture to initiate.
• Mid-move capture: If the final seed of a lap falls into an occupied hole, and the immediately following hole is in the player's inner row and contains seeds, a capture is triggered against the opponent's facing column. The opponent's facing inner-row seeds and any outer-row seeds behind it are seized and re-sown across the player's side, starting with the first seed placed directly inside the effecting inner hole.

End of Game and Winning

• A player wins immediately upon completely emptying the opponent's inner row of seeds, regardless of how many seeds may still reside in the opponent's outer row.
• If an unbroken perpetual sowing loop develops without further captures (such as configurations of singletons alternating with empty holes), the game is declared a draw.

Notes

• Luba game boards, often carved from single blocks of fine indigenous hardwoods, stand out in Central African decorative art for their figurative caryatids and ornate ancestral headpieces.
• While pits are typically round, rectangular or quadratic holes were historically favored in parts of Katanga (Shaba province).
• Traditional counters include hard seeds harvested from the ngola tree (Pictantus makombo) or dark oily seeds from the menga (Canarium schweinfurtii).
• Literature and folklore celebrate Kisolo as a refuge and intellectual sanctuary, famously invoked in Pierre Makombo Bamboté's 1966 writings depicting life and contemplative recreation beneath the mango trees of Central Africa.

Source: Mancala World – Kisolo

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