Mancala Rules of Rushing

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Melissa Schenk and on behalf of expertvillage.com, today we’re discussing strategy techniques for playing the game Mancala. Now, my next strategy technique we like to call…It’s basically called rushing. You know what the word rushing means. You’re rushing, you’re hurrying, you’re trying to, in this case, finish the game quickly. Now, we know the object of the game is not to be the first person out, but to have the most stones in your larger Mancala. Rushing though is a great way to play the game if you’ve counted out your stones properly, and in various sequences you can finish the game on your own. So, in some ways you’re also starving your opponent because they’re not getting to play. But if you’ve got a lot of stones in your Mancala, and you can go out first but also win the game, well then rushing is definitely a strategy technique that you might want to explore. If we look at the board once again for instance, the way this is setup. If I were to rush the game in this sense, I’m going to take the stones out of C. I’m going to sow them into D, E, then F, and my last stone falls into M. You can see here by taking the stones out of D, 1, 2, 3, I would get another turn once again. If I take the stones out of, let’s say E, 1, 2, 3, I don’t necessarily get another turn, but I have been rushing the game. Now, if I were to redo that for instance, and I would get another turn here, you can see I could also have the option, when I get my other turn, to take the stone out of A, put it into B, and then I would get to take the stones out K and B and now that’s Mancala. Now, I don’t get another turn, and in this case, we didn’t rush the game to finish it, but we did certainly get a lot of stones in our larger Mancala. You can see by counting these up, you’re still, it looks like so far, you’re still going to win the game."