Mancala Rules: How to Play, Setup, and Scoring

Mancala rules vary more than almost any other family of games on this site, so it helps to be specific up front: this page describes Kalah, the two-row, six-pit, four-stones-per-pit commercial rule set sold in North America under the name “Mancala.” That is the version almost everyone means when they ask how a Mancala board works, and it is the version covered start to finish below, including the board layout, sowing, the capture rule, the extra-turn rule, scoring, and how a game ends.

Mancala rules: how to play mancala in a nutshell

“Mancala” is really a family name, not one game — it covers hundreds of pit-and-seed games played across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, from two-row Kalah to the four-row Bao played in East Africa. The board, boxed set, and rules on this page are Kalah’s: two rows of six pits each, a store at either end, and four stones in every pit to start. Where a well-known relative such as Oware plays a rule differently, that difference is called out by name rather than folded in as if Kalah were the only way to play.

Board setup and pit numbering

Sit across the board from your opponent. You own the six pits on your side (closest to you) and the store at your right-hand end; your opponent owns the six pits on their side and the store at their right-hand end, which sits at the opposite end of the board from yours. Start every pit with four stones and leave both stores empty.

To talk about the board precisely, number the pits 1 through 12 in the direction stones travel: your pits are 1 through 6, running left to right in front of you, with your store immediately after pit 6. Play then continues into your opponent’s row at pit 7 (next to your store) through pit 12 (next to their store), and from their store back around to your pit 1. Pit 1 and pit 12 sit directly opposite each other, as do 2 and 11, 3 and 10, 4 and 9, 5 and 8, and 6 and 7 — that opposite-pit pairing is exactly what the capture rule below uses.

How a turn works

Pick any one of your own pits that has at least one stone in it, lift out every stone in it, and sow them one at a time into the following pits, moving counter-clockwise: pit 1 feeds pit 2, pit 6 feeds your own store, your store feeds pit 7, and so on around the board. Your own store gets a stone when sowing reaches it; your opponent’s store never does — sowing skips straight over it and continues into their pit 1 (from their point of view) on the far side. If you pick up enough stones to go all the way around the board more than once, you keep sowing through every pit (including your own store) each full lap.

There’s no choice beyond which pit to start from — no dice, and nothing hidden — which is a big part of why mancala plays so fast. That’s one real contrast with a dice game like backgammon, where the roll decides how far you can move and limits your options every turn; in mancala, the number of stones in the pit you choose decides everything about that turn, deterministically.

The capture rule

Sowing can end in one of three ways: in an occupied pit (nothing special happens), in your own store (you go again — see below), or in an empty pit on your own side, which triggers a capture. Landing your last stone in a pit on your side that held no stones before that stone arrived captures that stone plus every stone in the pit directly opposite it on your opponent’s side; all of it goes straight into your store. Landing in an empty pit on your opponent’s side never captures anything, and landing in an occupied pit on either side never captures anything either — it only matters for your own, previously-empty pit.

The pair of boards below shows one capture from start to finish. Before the move, pit 1 holds a single stone, pit 2 (also yours) is empty, and pit 11 — directly opposite pit 2 — holds five stones. Playing pit 1 sows that one stone into pit 2, which was empty, so the move captures the stone just placed there along with all five stones from pit 11, adding six stones to Store A at once.

The extra-turn rule

The other special landing spot is your own store. Whenever the very last stone you sow in a turn lands there — rather than in any pit — you immediately take another turn: pick up a different pit on your own side and sow again, under the exact same rules, including the chance to capture or to land in your store a second time and go again after that.

The pair of boards below shows this from start to finish. Before the move, pit 5 holds two stones, pit 6 holds three, and Store A holds four. Playing pit 5 sows its two stones one at a time: the first lands in pit 6, and the last lands in Store A. Because that last stone landed in the store rather than a pit, the same player moves again right away.

Scoring

Mancala scores itself as you play: whatever you capture or sow directly into your store sits there for the rest of the game, and nothing can ever leave a store once a stone lands in it. There’s no separate scoring step during play — just the running stone count in each store — which makes it easy to glance at the board at any point and see who’s ahead.

How the game ends

The game ends the moment one player, on their turn, has no stones left anywhere in their own six pits. At that point, whichever player still has stones on their side sweeps all of them into their own store — this is the final move of the game, and it’s usually the biggest single swing in score. Whoever’s store holds the most stones afterward wins; with 48 stones on the board and no stones ever destroyed, a tie is possible but uncommon once a few captures have happened.

That sweep rule itself has two common versions. The one described above — the player who still has stones keeps them — is the standard rule in Kalah and the one this page uses throughout. A less common house variant instead gives the leftover stones to the opponent, on the reasoning that the player who emptied their row first “finished,” and some informal games skip the sweep entirely and simply leave the remaining stones out of the final count. Agree on which version you’re using before the game gets close to ending, since it can matter.

Mancala variants and house rules

Kalah is one game in a very large family, and a few points of difference come up often enough to know by name. Starting stone count varies by set and region: four per pit, as covered above, is standard for commercial Kalah boards, but three per pit and six per pit are both common, printed house variants that just shorten or lengthen the game without changing any other rule.

Oware, the best-known West African member of the family, swaps out Kalah’s capture rule entirely. Instead of capturing by landing in an empty pit, Oware captures when your last sown stone brings an opponent’s pit to exactly two or three stones — and if the pit immediately before that one also ends at two or three, its stones are captured too, chaining backward as far as the count holds. Oware also has no separate stores at all; captured stones go straight to each player’s personal pile off the board, scored similarly to how a finished hand of dominoes gets totaled up once play stops, rather than accumulating turn by turn the way a Kalah store does.

Two other differences are worth flagging if you pick up a board without printed instructions. First, whether sowing passes over a player’s own store on a second lap: Kalah always skips the opponent’s store but does pass through your own on a multi-lap sow, while some mancala variants skip every store on every lap. Second, as covered above, which player keeps the leftover stones when the game ends — standard Kalah gives them to whoever still has them, while a house-rule version hands them to the opponent instead. None of these change how a single turn is played; they just mean “mancala” can describe a noticeably different game depending on which board you sat down at.

Equipment note

Any Kalah board works the same way regardless of what the pieces are made from — glass stones, dried beans, cowrie shells, and marbles are all traditional depending on region. All that matters for the rules is the count: twelve pits, two stores, and enough stones to put four in every pit at the start.