Mancala Rules of Hoarding
Mancala Rules of Raiding
Mancala Rules of Starving
Mancala Rules of Rushing
Mancala Rules of Stalling
Mancala Rules of Stuffing
Mancala Rules of Looping
Mancala Rules of Sacrificing
Setting Up for Mancala
Interacting Strategies When Playing Mancala
Tips for Beginners Mancala Players
Avoiding Excessive Build Up in Mancala
Timing Plays to Your Opponent in Mancala
Ideal Opening Sequence for Mancala
Pattern Recognition in Mancala
Summary: Learn about ideal opening sequences when playing the game mancala, with rules, instructions, directions, moves and strategy for how to play mancala well, in this free instructional video.
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"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 technique is a big one. I’m going to give away a really big secret. This next technique is called an ideal opening sequence; this is a really good one. We talked that in this game we’re playing with 48 stones, 4 stones in each of the bins. This next strategy technique is an ideal opening sequence when you’re playing with 4 stones in each of your smaller Mancalas. Okay, so the ideal opening sequence goes a little bit like this. We’re going to start off, of course, my side is A-F, so this my Mancala, and G-L is your Mancala. I’m going to begin and I’m going to start off with C, taking these 4 stones, putting them into D, E, F, and end up with one stone in my larger Mancala. Therefore, I get another turn. My next sequence, my next move, is going to by taking all of the stones out of bin F. Putting one into my Mancala, one into yours, G, H, I, and J. Now, you might have wondered why I did these or made these various moves, but these moves actually have some really great strengths. For one, it empties bin F out early on in the game. We talked about in an earlier segment, some earlier clips, emptying bin F as often as possible as well. More importantly, it puts you, my opponent, into a defensive position on your very first move of the game. As you can see here, if I am going around the board, I already have C empty and F empty. If any of my stones fall into C or F, I am going to rage, so this puts you in a defensive position right off the bat for when you are starting your very first move when playing the game Mancala. "
eHow Article: Ideal Opening Sequence for Mancala
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Comments
evuser9813 said
on 12/23/2008 Hi David -
If you'd like to see the ideal response to that move, you can read it at www.fritzdooley.com/mancala. That's my website where I published a research papaer on mancala as part of a game theory class at Harvard Business School. Turns out Melissa Schenk has plagiarized my content to produce her video series here - all the specific strategies, everything - it's from my paper.
I used a computer to anaylize every possible game to the end. The opening move featured here is mathematically proven to be the best opening move.
davidklausa said
on 8/2/2008 That is the obvious opening, not the only one however. If you're talking about the "sequence," it would nice to see the ideal response to that move.
brockrhodes said
on 8/2/2008 You're absolutely right. The best thing the player that goes second can do is to move H and hit their Mancala and then G to avoid a capture on the first player's next move. This, of course, delays the second player emptying of L on their first move and delays them receiving any "free stones."
The best strategy in this form of Mancala is to of course go first. For 3, 4, and 5 stone games (this one being a 4) is simply to use this strategy and go first. This game suffers from a huge first move bias.
Also, this particular game is called "Kalah." It's a Western mancala game, where the mancala is the type of game it is (like how Spades and Poker are card games). Mancala games are the oldest known to man.
You should play Oware (or Awele). It's also known as African chess and doesn't suffer this bias.