Mancala Rules of Looping

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, our next strategy technique that we’re going to be discussing is called looping. Now, you can imagine as we go around the board in a counterclockwise motion, you’re basically trying to loop yourself around the board to steal your opponent’s stones. If we go to the board here, a successful looping maneuver would look something like this. Again, as I mentioned, looping is going all the way around the board to raid pebbles from your opponent’s bin, which is too far to the left to be accessed with a loop. What I’m looking at here is the letter L. I would love to raid those stones. And look at this, F can probably loop around the board and take care of this ambush strategy. Now, it’s an effective strategy when your opponent is not keeping careful count of the stones in their bin. Sometimes they just randomly are not paying attention, so that’s where all of these strategies really come into play. You can take advantage of sort of a surprise attack, if you will. You take all of the stones out of F, you put one into your larger Mancala, then you sow them. G, H, I, J, K, L. Of course, you by pass their Mancala because you don’t put any stones in theirs. You put your last stone into A, and therefore, you’ve not only gained the stone in A, but all of these stones in L. So the looping strategy, of course, very effective. Look how many stones we gained in that strategy alone. "