Tsoro

Game type: Four-row traditional mancala without stores; 2 players, 21 pits per rank; Zimbabwean Shona variant (Fuva/Imbwe) with musoro head holes, relay sowing, and discretionary two-hole bonus captures.

Play this game in your browser

Overview

Among the Shona people of northeastern Zimbabwe, Tsoro is a generic designation applied to traditional board and counters games, encompassing indigenous draughts, three-in-a-row alignment puzzles (Tsoro Yemutatu), twelve-men Morris (Tsoro Yemutwelve), and complex mancala forms. The classic four-row mancala detailed here is specifically known as Fuva or Imbwe, with rules first systematically documented in 1964 by researcher J. B. Matthews. Deeply woven into communal recreation, matches are customarily played outdoors by scooping pits (magomba) straight into earth or sand and playing with smooth river pebbles (matombo), wild seeds, or repurposed bottle caps, though boards are also drawn on paper and carved in wood. Contested on an expansive 4×21 layout, Tsoro is celebrated for its strategic depth, featuring dedicated outer-rank "heads" (misoro) that allow discretionary move termination, as well as sweeping bonus captures that allow a player to plunder extra enemy pockets after breaching the front line.

Board

• Ranks/rows: Four
• Holes per row: Twenty-one (84 holes total on the standard full-size layout)
• Stores: None (captured pebbles are removed permanently from play)
• The holes are known in Shona as magomba (singular: gomba); the counters are called matombo ("stones").
• Each player commands the two ranks on their side of the board.
• *Heads (misoro): The two rightmost holes of each player's outer row are designated as "heads" (musoro; plural: misoro*), functioning as tactical sanctuaries.
• Initial layout: Outer rows begin with two stones per hole; both inner rows start completely empty (84 stones total):

    2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
    0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

How to Play

• Players take turns moving stones.
• On a player's turn, they lift all stones from any hole on their side holding at least two counters and sow them counterclockwise, dropping one stone per hole around their two ranks.
• Relay sowing: If the last stone of a lap lands in an occupied hole other than a head, its contents are picked up and distributed in another lap.
• Head mechanics: If the final stone falls into an occupied head (musoro), the player has the tactical choice either to pick up its contents and continue relaying, or to stop the move immediately.
• Turn termination: A move ends when the last stone drops into an empty hole, or when a player voluntarily stops upon landing in an occupied head.
• Singletons: When a player has only singletons remaining, a single stone may be moved, but strictly only if the immediately following adjacent hole is empty.

Capturing

• When the last stone of a move falls into an empty hole in the player's inner row, and the directly opposite inner-row hole of the opponent contains stones, those opponent stones are captured.
• Simultaneously, any stones resting in the opponent's outer back-row hole in the same file are also captured, clearing the column completely.
• Bonus captures: After effecting a front-row capture, the player earns the right to confiscate the contents of any two additional enemy holes of their choice anywhere on the opponent's side of the board.
• All captured stones are removed from the board.

End of Game and Winning

• The game concludes when a player is completely immobilized and can make no further moves.
• The player who still has stones remaining on the board is declared the victor. Traditional play recognizes no draws.

Notes

• Regional variants: J. B. Matthews recorded several common rule variations across Zimbabwe:
  • Limiting the bonus capture to only one additional enemy hole, or raising it to three bonus holes.
  • Treating only the single rightmost hole as a head, which is seeded with three counters in the opening setup.
  • Utilizing smaller board layouts to expedite play, such as 4×6, 4×8, 4×12, 4×15, and 4×18 grids.
• Terminology: Pits are called magomba, stones are matombo, and head pits are misoro (singular musoro, literally "head").
• Ethnographic reference: J. B. Matthews, Tsoro: A Traditional Shona Game, 1964.

Source: Mancala World – Tsoro

All mancala games