Mancala Kalah 1.0

Mancala Kalah is a very interesting and even complicated board game. It can be played against a computer opponent or a human player on the same computer.

The objective of the game is to capture more seeds than your opponent. The board is composed of six pits for each player and a store on each side. When the game starts, there will be seeds in each of the pits. When you click on one of the pits, each of the seeds that were there will be moved to consecutive pits to the player's right hand side. When one seed enters the house, you score one point. If after a move, the last seed that moves lands in the store, you get an extra move.

The above description is overly simplistic. It may sound like the game is a piece of cake, but some degree of strategy is required to win. The computer opponent beat me a couple of times until I figured out how to plan for future moves. Once you do that, the game becomes much easier. In Mancala Kalah, the player who starts playing has an advantage. I read somewhere that with perfect play, the first player can win every game in the 3 to 6 seed variants.

There is a free version of Mancala Kalah available on the Mac App Store. It is fully functional, but it limits the number of starting seeds to 3 per pit.