Forty-Eight Stone Mancala Game

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Melissa Schenk and on behalf of expertvillage.com, having worked at the world-renowned Family and Company toy store located in Stratford, Ontario, I’m here today to talk to you about basic tips for playing a very interesting game called Mancala. Now we take a look at the board once again. In our earlier examples in earlier clips, we were talking about playing a game with 3 stones in each of the compartments, so that’s 36 pieces. Now, I normally play with 4 stones, this is the most commonly type of Mancala or game played is usually with 4 stones, it’s an intermediate level. The 3 stones is very good especially for kids when they’re just learning how to count. They can get up to 36, then you can push them onto 48 or they can perhaps count up towards 50 but it’s a fast pace game as I mentioned. So you can see with the 4 stones, how much fuller actually the board gets, so you can only just imagine when you’re playing with 6 stones that some of these compartments can get filled up very quickly. So strategically, how we were playing with the 3 stones in each of the compartments, you can do much of the same just changing your location. When we were playing with 3 stones I started here, I went 1, 2, 3, well with 4 stones, strategically, if you would like to start off the game and you would like another turn, well you just move one compartment back, take the 4 stones, and go 1, 2, 3, 4. Now you’ll see with 4 stones, for instance the last time when we had 3, I went 1, 2, 3 and I had an empty compartment here, which meant I got to take these stones. You can see by adding 4 stones now, it’s completely different. So if you’re a real numbers person, Mancala is definitely the game for you because strategically just adding just one more stone to each of the compartments changes the game completely. "