https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala if you want more info
And it is indeed mentioned under the Names and Variants section. Seems likely that there's a historical connection somewhere.
..cringe...
Doesn't that sentence sound bizarre to you. Is that why people bowl? And isn't the implication that American males need help learning social skills?
They played the game for the same reasons that all humans have played games for millennia.
There’s a joke in here about perspective
... I'll see myself out.
It’s instructive to see old Africans playing Mankala. They play very fast. It can become more like poker, where deceit is a part of the game. If you spam down your stones fast enough sometimes you can skip a bowl, or drop an extra stone, in order to gain advantage.
I’m not facile enough to play this way, and I play with family and so don’t cheat. It’s a very different thing, though. Like the difference between British ladies playing slow Mahjong over tea, versus people playing for money in a gambling room in China.
What you describe is just a talent at cheating, and I assume against the rules of the game. In poker, bluffing is an explicit part of the game allowed by the rules. I wouldn't even call it "deceit" in that context. At the very least, these are highly distinct categories of deceit.
The rules state that property owners can ask for the rent until the next player rolls the dice.
Even when you adjust for population and CD key pricing.
I wouldn't equate skipping a bowl with bluffing. Maybe, palming a chip as you put your bet in: which certainly isn't "part of the game".
Sports have a lot of things that are in some sense against the rules, but standard penalties are applied if caught, and it's just a part of the game, like fouling a player in basketball. Nobody considers it cheating, it's a part of the game because the penalty is standardized. Of course you still try not to get caught.
Fouls are conserved and used throughout the game. They're usually somewhere between intentional and accidental - you'd rather get your hand on the ball and not foul if you can. But you'd often rather foul than they get the 2 points if those are your only options. And how many fouls you have left against their best shooters is a major consideration throughout the game.
There's an anecdote about some Kobe Bryant trash talk that I think demonstrates both that fouls are valued for stopping 2 points, but ALSO the per-player foul limit is an additional consideration and separate strategic consideration.
> So we were playing, and you know it was like a two-on-one break. And, Caron Butler fouls and stops the break. So everybody was like, "Good job! That stop stops two points."
> So, Kobe comes out... and we’re all like, "Good, Good. You saved two points."
> Kobe walks over to him and says, "Hey, who are you guarding?", and Butler responds, "You!", and he goes, "Huh... How many fouls you got?". And Caron says, "I got one!" and Kobe says, "So you only got five left? Well, you need all six fouls to guard me, and you just wasted one... on him! It’s a stupid... stupid play!"
> And you had to think about it like... "God, he’s right!"
computer scientist vs. an optometrist.
What does being an optometrist have to do with anything?
"classic" here is tongue-in-cheek
We were there with a couple of smart people, so we started winning against the local kids/ In reaction, they rapidly started “telling us about” rules and exceptions that they forgot to mention earlier. Definitely not making those up. The new rules were not outrageously out of place, but they had a real tendency to turn our previous move into a clearly damaging one.
We started calling those frequent, sudden shifts “African rules.” Kids were not a fan of that expression. Apparently, we were there to make the kids feel great about themselves and help the local authority. We had this belief that winning only occasionally would make their victory sweeter, and learning how to lie to white folks while keeping a straight face seemed to be a key life skill for them.
Goal shifts made the game a lot more interesting, though: could we play in a way that made their rule change predictable so that we could win the meta-game?
I'm not sure how you would be able to program that, presumably with a finite grammar of rules, but it could update the original challenge a bit.
I imagine generally the upper limit on always winning is higher. As in, usually the person consistently losing wants to stop playing before the player consistently winning.
I solved a simpler game about 15 years ago that my brother and I used to play: an African game with about 10 pits on each side of the board that hold stones. I coded up an alpha-beta engine for it, and discovered crazy always win strategies to match how my brother and I played. Suddenly I would win all the games, and then he never wanted to play again. This was a classic match up of a computer scientist vs. an optometrist.