To wrap up a summer on mancala I thought I’d offer up a rather intriguing variant 55Stones.
The game 55Stones was said to have been invented on Halloween night 2002 by Ralf Gering in Kusterdingen, Germany.
“The game was originally meant to be a candidate of the Simultaneous Game Design Competition sponsored by About Board Games and Abstract Games magazine in 2002/2003, but when the inventor became a member of the jury, he withheld the game,” notes www.mancala.wikia.com. “55Stones (originally spelled 55 Stones) was first published in the Yahoo! forum mancala games on February 7, 2004. The game is also described in a Catalonian Wiki on mancala games and at BoardGameGeek.
“It was added to Super Duper Games, a Canadian hobby site for playing various freely available games over the web, on October 21, 2006.”
55Stones has several unusual features:
• It is one of the few one-rank mancala games for two players. To me this is the greatest draw to trying this one. A single row of 11 cups, (plus two end collection spots one for each player), gives a very different feel to the game. Each cut starts with five stones, hence the name 55Stones.
• All moves are played on the board simultaneously, which is otherwise only known from Agsinnoninka, a traditional Philippine game. However, unlike Agsinnoninka, all moves are performed at equal speed (starting and ending at exactly the same time) and all decisions are made in turns. Therefore, 55Stones is a game with complete information.
The players called West (or Blue on Super Duper Games) and East (or Red) sit at the distant ends of the board and the cup is put on the right side, respectively, details www.mancala.wikia.com
East starts. Each move, one player takes the contents of one hole in his hand, then the opponent must take the contents of another hole in his hand. The player who has the privilege to decide first has Sente (a term borrowed from Go), the other player has Gote,” it describes.
A player may only take the contents of a hole which at least contains two stones.
Then both players simultaneously distribute the contents of their chosen hole towards the opponent. The stones are distributed one by one. In each step one stone is dropped simultaneously while players count together and aloud “one, two, three, four ...” for each step done in a move.
“If the last stone is dropped in a non-empty hole, its contents are taken (including the stone you just dropped there) and simultaneously distributed together with your opponent in the following holes, if the opponent still has stones in his hand. A hole is also regarded as “non-empty” if the opponent has just dropped a stone into it,” details the rules at www.mancala.wikia.com
Each step is defined by dropping exactly one stone. Lifting up stones from a hole is not considered a step.
“If a stone is dropped into an end hole, the direction of distribution is changed 180 degrees, that is, you continue in the opposite direction,” continues the website.
If the last stone of both players is dropped into the same hole or in empty holes, the move is over and nothing is captured.
“If the last stone is dropped into an empty hole, the player says: “Stop!” He then wins all stones which his opponent still has in hand after he completed this step.” notes the site.
“A player keeps Sente, if nothing was captured. If something was captured (no matter by whom), the player who had Gote gets Sente now.
“After the first stones have been captured by reaching an empty hole first, the player who had Sente decides if the board is turned 180 degrees (“pie rule”). This action changes the player’s color, Sente/Gote and the ownership of captured stones.
“This new pie rule was suggested by Clark D. Rodeffer and officially replaced the old pie rule on May 11, 2007. The old rule stated that the game can only be swapped after the first pair of simultaneous moves whether stones were captured or not. However, an extensive analysis of all 110 openings showed that this was unfair to the second player.|
The game ends when simultaneous play is no longer possible.
The player who captured more stones has won the game.
The single line of cups and simultaneous play certainly make 55Stones worthy of exploration by mancala players.
