Hawalis

Hawalis is a traditional mancala game played in Oman, where it forms part of the region's long-standing mancala culture. A closely related version of the same game is played in Zanzibar under the name Bao la Kiarabu, with rules that differ slightly from the Omani form. Like other mancala games, Hawalis is played on a board of pits in which players sow and capture seeds or counters according to set rules, with each player commanding one half of the board. As a traditional folk game passed down through regional play rather than a commercially published design, Hawalis has no single recorded inventor or fixed year of origin, and its rules are documented mainly through ethnographic and folk-game scholarship on mancala games of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.