Makonn

Makonn is a traditional board game from the Seychelles, an island nation in the western Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. The Ludii Portal classes it as a four-row sowing game in the mancala style. It is played on a board of four rows of ten holes with forty counters in all, one in each hole at the start. Before play begins each player in turn rearranges the counters on their own side of the board in any way they like, which lets them prepare captures in advance. Players then pick up the counters from a hole and sow them anticlockwise, and when the last counter lands in an occupied hole the sowing continues from there. A last counter that falls in an empty hole either ends the turn or captures, and captures are taken only from the inner row, together with the facing outer-row hole if it holds counters. The game ends when a player has nothing left to move, with special rules once only single counters remain. It was described to the researcher Alex de Voogt in 2007, and game boards kept in a national museum show it was already known at about the time of the First World War.