Tihbat
Game type: Two-player two-row mancala without stores; 2×2 board with single-lap counter-clockwise sowing; first seed sown into origin pit; captures exclusively on player's home side for even counts up to eight.
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Overview
Tihbat is an intriguing miniature mancala game played by children—both girls and boys—originating from the Taourirt province in the Oriental region of northeastern Morocco. The game came to international attention in February 2006 when educator Lalo Kinast observed Moroccan diaspora children enthusiastically playing it in Flix, a riverside town in Catalonia, Spain. Kinast recorded the oral rules and shared them with Catalan game scholar Víktor Bautista i Roca.
Featuring a micro-grid of just four depressions (two rows of two holes), Tihbat is one of the smallest authentic two-row mancalas ever documented. Despite its compact footprint, the game generates rich tactical complexity through origin-pit re-sowing and a unique defensive capture rule that rewards players for cultivating even clusters strictly within their home territory.
Board
- Ranks/rows: Two
- Holes per row: 2
- Stores: None
- Seeds per hole at start: 7 counters (small pebbles or seeds)
- Total seeds: 28 counters
- Each participant commands the two depressions on their side of the 2×2 layout.
How to Play
- Players alternate turns. On their turn, a player picks up all pieces from one of their two home holes.
- Origin Sowing: The player deposits the first counter directly back into the hole just emptied, before continuing to sow the remaining counters singly in a counter-clockwise circuit around the board.
- Sowing terminates after a single lap once all lifted counters are placed.
- If a player cannot move because both home pits are empty, they pass until counters enter their territory.
Capturing
- A capture is triggered only if the final counter of a turn lands in a hole situated on the active player's own side of the board.
- If that home hole attains an even total not exceeding eight pieces (i.e. exactly 2, 4, 6, or 8 counters), all counters in that pit are captured and taken off the board.
- Landings in the opponent's territory never result in captures.
End of Game and Winning
- The game concludes when all counters are captured or when the board reaches an impasse.
- Because sparse configurations (such as four singletons continuously circling the tiny track) can cycle indefinitely, any repeated board position with the same player to move triggers an automatic draw/resolution, with remaining board counters divided equally between the competitors.
- The player who has amassed the largest tally of captured seeds is declared the winner.
Notes
- Along with games like Modiar, Tihbat represents a distinct Moroccan design tradition that mandates dropping the first counter of a sow back into the originating pit (sowOriginFirst). This ensures that pits rarely remain completely vacant for long.
- Restricting captures exclusively to home-side pits (owareChainOwnSideOnly) shifts the tactical paradigm from aggressive border raids to careful domestic preparation: players deliberately bait their own houses to welcome a friendly final seed and harvest the even jackpot.
Source: Mancala World – Tihbat