Description
A manqala game.
From Wikimanqala:
Krur (crur) is a game is played by Hassaniya (Moor) people. They are a mix of Arab Beduins and Tamazigh (Berber). Their language is mostly an Arab dialect with a strong Tamazigh influence.
Hassaniya-speaking people live in the western Sahara from Niger to Mauritania. They constitute the majority of the population in Mauritania and in the Saharian Arabic Democratic Republic. There are some in Southern Morocco, Algeria, northern Senegal, Mali, and also a few in Niger. This region is called Trab el Bidan, ie. land of white people, in contrast to Bilal al Sudan, or land of black people.
Krur is mostly played by children.
Usually the holes, which are called "houses", are dug in the sand
Rules:
The board is made of two rows of four holes.
At the beginning, there are four seeds in each hole.
Each player controls the holes on his side of the board.
On your turn you take all the seeds from any hole of your side of the board and sow them in an anticlockwise sense, one in each hole, starting in the next one.
If you end in an empty hole, it is the end of your turn
If the last seed lands in an occupied hole on the opponent's side, making a total of four seeds, you end your turn and this hole is captured by you. It is marked somehow.
If the last seed lands in an occupied hole all these seeds (the one just landed plus the ones that were already there) are taken up and you keep on sowing starting in the next hole.
You sow seeds in the holes you have captured but not in those captured by your opponent.
You cannot start a sowing from a captured hole.
The winner of the game is the one that, when there are no more seeds in play, has captured more than the opponent.
Usually you don't play just a game, but a match.
On the next game you start filling the holes with the captured seeds.
The winner fills all his holes with four seeds.
The looser fills all the holes he can with four seeds. If he has some remaining seeds, he puts them in another hole, but always an even number of them, so he can retain a single seed.
The empty holes on the loser's side of the board are refilled with sand or marked somehow. In the next game nobody plays in them.
If the looser has not enough holes to put his seeds, he reopens as many holes as he needs.
There is no fixed rule about the order to close or reopen the holes. Sometimes they are opened from left to right. However, it is not important to the game.
The winner of the match is the one who captures all the seeds and leaves the opponent with no holes on his side."
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