Mancala Rules of Sacrificing

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’ll talk about is something that we call sacrificing. Now, a beginner player tends to avoid being raided at all costs, but sometimes sacrificing some of your stones can be a very good baiting technique, or baiting strategy used to kind of tease your opponent. We take a look at the board for instance. When you are sacrificing, as I mentioned, the beginning player will usually avoid being raided at all costs. If you look at D, if one of my stones goes into E, of course I can steal the stones out of H. A lot of beginner players try to avoid this at all costs, but as I mentioned, it can be a very good baiting strategy because you’ve only got 3 stones here to necessary lose. Where if you count the various stones out here in other moves, you probably have more to gain by only losing 3 stones than by losing more stones later on. Sometimes by taking these and putting them into your Mancala, your opponent might have sacrificed those stones to you but also baited you in the end. "