Mangala (game)

Mangala is a traditional two row mancala family board game played across parts of the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, using a wooden board with two rows of shallow pits and a larger store pit at each end belonging to one of the two players. Each player begins with an equal number of seeds distributed among their own row of pits and, on their turn, picks up all the seeds from one of their pits and sows them one by one into successive pits moving counterclockwise around the board, including their own store but skipping the opponent's store. A turn that ends with the final seed landing in an empty pit on the player's own side allows that player to capture the seeds in the directly opposite pit on the opponent's row, and the game ends when one side's row is emptied, with each player then claiming the seeds remaining on their own side. Mangala is one of many closely related regional mancala games sharing this sowing and capturing mechanic under different local names and rule variants.