An unusual mancala game board

Yesterday I bought a Mancala game board in a small 'ethnic knickknacks' shop in Brussels. Most such boards on sale in Brussels come from Africa, and are designed for playing the common West African variety of the game called Awalé. The board I bought, however, is from Indonesia, where the game is played on a slightly different size of board.

In Indonesia the game is called Congkak or Dakon, and is usually played in boards with two rows of seven holes (2x7), plus 'store holes' at each end. The board I found, though, is rarer – it has two rows of only five holes, plus the store-holes. I have never before seen such a board on sale – in fact it is rare to see any boards other than the mass-produced 'two rows of six holes' Awalé boards; so much so that many westerners think that this is the only real form of Mancala. They could not be further from the truth – there are over 400 varieties of the game, spread from South America and the Caribbean across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as far as the Philippines and the Marianas Islands.

The rules of play for Congkak on a 2x5 board may be the same as in the larger versions (boards of 2 x 9, plus store holes, are also known), but the game may be shorter and quicker.

The game was sold along with a set of 40 pieces, which were Nickernuts, or seeds of the Caesalpinia bonduc shrub. These are the traditional playing piece in West Africa and the Caribbean, but not in Indonesia, so it seems that the shop added them to the board.

In Indonesia, and much of Asia, the game is played with small Cowrie shells:

In fact the holes in the board would be too small for Nickernuts, which are much bigger than Cowrie shells. In Congkak there are usually as many shells per hole at the start of the game as there are holes on each side of the board, i.e. 5 shells per hole, or 50 in total for the game. The fact that the shop gave me only 40 seeds showed that they didn't really understand what they were selling.

Upon request, the shop also gave me a simple photocopied sheet of 'rules' for the game I was buying, and this proved beyond doubt that they didn't have much understanding of the game, because the rules were for Awalé, and a board of 2x6 was specified. No harm was done though, because I already have rules for most of the known Mancala variants, including Congkak. The board joins my collection of Mancala boards, mostly home-made, which already includes all of the main sizes of boards – 2x6, 2x7, 2x12, 3x6, 4x7 and 4x8.