Mancala

Mancala 1.0 is a Macintosh implementation of the ancient African stone-and-pits game, released May 22, 1994 by Todd Clements (tclement@osiris.ac.hmc.edu) of Harvey Mudd College. It is the first public release of the program and is filed in the Info-Mac board-games directory alongside several later, independent Mancala adaptations.

The game

Mancala is one of the oldest known board games, traditionally played by moving stones around a row of carved pits. Clements describes the rules as simple to learn but the underlying logic as "interesting, and it can become very addicting." Play is two-player against a computer opponent.

Optional sound pack

A companion archive, Mancala_Sounds.sit, ships as a separate download because of its size. The sounds are not required to play but, in the author's words, "make the game more fun." The same sound set was intended to work with later versions of the program.

Author and support

Clements published the program under his Harvey Mudd address and invited fan-mail, hate-mail, and bug reports at tclement@hmc.edu. Distribution was free, with no shareware fee attached to this initial release.

Archive context

This entry sits alongside YA-Mancala (Keith Rose) and Mancala 2000 (Seth Tabberer) in the Info-Mac board games directory; the three are independent implementations rather than versions of a single project, reflecting how often Mac shareware authors tackled the same classic abstract games in parallel.