Obridjie
Game type: Two-player two-row mancala with storage pits, six holes per row; multi-lap relay sowing; mid-sow fours captured by pit owner, lap-ending fours captured by the mover.
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Overview
Obridjie is a traditional two-row mancala game played by the Ijaw (Ijo) people of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria. First recorded in January 1946 by K. C. Murray—son of pioneering board game scholar Harold James Ruthven Murray—Obridjie is an elegant, accessible game historically favored by women. It is closely related to other Nigerian two-row games such as Whyo (played by the Oron clan of the Ibibio), Jerin (Yoruba), and Lok (Jaba), and shares close mechanical kinship with Anywoli in the Horn of Africa.
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 6
- Stores: Yes, one store hole at each end of the board; each player owns the row facing them and the store hole situated to their right
- Seeds per hole at start: 4 (total seeds: 48 in the playing holes)
How to Play
- On their turn, a player picks up all seeds from one of their playing holes and sows them, one by one, counter-clockwise into subsequent playing holes. Sowing never enters the store holes.
- Sowing proceeds via multi-lap relay: if the last seed lands in an occupied hole, all seeds in that hole (including the newly dropped seed) are picked up and distributed in another lap.
- A move concludes when the last seed drops into an empty hole, or when it creates a group of four seeds.
Capturing
- If at any point during sowing a hole contains exactly four seeds, those four seeds are immediately captured and placed into the store of the player who owns that hole.
- Final-seed exception: If the final seed of a sowing lap brings a hole to exactly four seeds, those four seeds are captured by the moving player, regardless of which side of the board the hole is on.
End of Game and Winning
- The game terminates as soon as a player is unable to make a legal move on their turn (immobilization).
- The player who has accumulated the greater number of seeds in their store wins the game. Any seeds remaining in the playing holes when play ends are disregarded and do not count toward either player's final tally.
Notes
- The Ijaw, numbering over 14 million people in Nigeria, maintain vibrant traditions of verbal arts, storytelling, and board play.
- In German ludological literature, Obridjie was documented in Helga Steuer and Christine Voigt's 1980 volume Das neue rororo Spielbuch, where a typographical error listed it as Obridjic in the main text while correctly spelling it in the index—an erroneous spelling subsequently copied by multiple secondary sources.
Source: Mancala World – Obridjie