Daramutu

Daramutu is a traditional mancala board game from Sri Lanka, first recorded in 1909 by the British engineer Henry Parker in his book Ancient Ceylon. In its traditional setting the game was played only by women. It is played on a board called an olinda-puruwa, laid out as two rows of seven pits each, with four seeds placed in every pit at the start. The first player to move chooses whether the game will be sown clockwise or counterclockwise, and that direction then governs the rest of the game. Players take turns picking up all the seeds from one of their own pits and sowing them one at a time around the board; specific seed counts encountered when the last seed lands can trigger further relay sowing or allow a player to capture seeds from the opponent's row. The traditional playing seeds come from the Abrus precatorius plant. The game ends once a player can no longer make a legal move, at which point any seeds remaining on the board pass to their opponent, and whoever has collected the greater number of seeds overall wins.