Mangala II
Game type: Two-player two-row mancala without stores; 2×6 board with single-lap counter-clockwise sowing; backward-chaining captures of pits reaching even counts of two, four, or six counters on either row; passing allowed when immobilized.
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Overview
Mangala is an illustrious Ottoman Turkish mancala game that attained widespread popularity throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries across Anatolia, the Levant, the Aegean Archipelago, and the Crimean peninsula. Literary historians connect it with the early mention of mancala in the fifteenth night of One Thousand and One Nights (Kitāb Alf Layla wa-Layla). Sixteenth-century Ottoman miniature paintings vividly depict citizens and courtly figures immersed in the game in bustling Turkish coffeehouses.
European travelers encountered and documented Mangala extensively: the French explorer Jean de Thévenot recorded it in 1664 during his travels in the Levant, followed by the Oxford orientalist Thomas Hyde in 1694. In 1771, Pierre Augustin Guys described its avid following in Constantinople. Mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke observed it played with small cowrie shells in Balaklava on the Crimean coast in 1801, while Peter Edmund Laurent encountered Greek and Turkish patrons playing it across Chios Island coffeehouses in 1818. The game also entered early 19th-century British romantic literature, featuring prominently in Sydney Owenson's Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809) and Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819).
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 6 (traditionally carved into wooden folding boxes or scooped directly into the earth)
- Stores: None
- Seeds per hole at start: 6 counters (historically glass beads called boncuğu or cowrie shells)
- Total seeds: 72 counters
- Each participant controls the rank of six holes nearest to them.
How to Play
- Players alternate turns. A player lifts the full contents of any non-empty pit on their side and sows them singly in a counter-clockwise trajectory around the board.
- Sowing is strictly single-lap; no relay sowing occurs.
- If a player's row contains no counters on their turn, they must pass, allowing the opponent to continue sowing until counters cycle back into their row.
Capturing
- When the final counter of a turn lands in any hole—regardless of whether it lies in the player's own row or the opponent's—and brings the hole's total count to two, four, or six counters, those pieces are captured and removed from the board.
- If the pit immediately preceding that hole along the sowing track also contains an even count of two, four, or six counters, those pieces are captured as well. This chain extends backward continuously through any unbroken series of pits meeting this even-parity condition.
End of Game and Winning
- The game concludes when all holes across the entire board have been emptied of counters.
- The player who has captured the greater number of counters (at least 37) is proclaimed the victor. An equal division of 36–36 results in a draw.
Notes
- Mangala is closely related to the Baltic German Bohnenspiel, differing primarily in that Mangala is traditionally played without dedicated scoring troughs (Schatzhöhlen) and incorporates passing rules that keep play alive until the board is completely cleared.
- Regional variants abound across the former Ottoman territories: the form played around Gaziantep in southeastern Anatolia incorporates multiple relay laps and opposite-pit captures akin to Syrian La'b Madjnuni, while diverse Bedouin variations persist across Egypt and Sinai.
- Mangala represents one of the earliest recorded instances of a mancala game being commercialized in Western Europe. In 1863, Walter Whitmore Jones registered a British copyright claiming personal invention of the game, which was subsequently manufactured and marketed in London by John Jaques & Son under the phonetic brand name Mangola.
- Turkish ethnologist Metin And noted the lightning speed and intense concentration demanded by traditional coffeehouse play, observing that masters must calculate moves while their adversary plays, as physical turn execution is swift and rhythmic.
Source: Mancala World – Mangala II