Why congkak?

Congkak is an old counting game from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, played on a long wooden board that is often carved like a boat. There is no luck. Every move is a small sum you can work out in your head, which makes it good counting practice for kids and a real puzzle for adults.

To be clear: our game plays by the rules of Kalah, a simpler game from the same family. Traditional congkak has seven holes a side, both players start sowing at the same time, and when your last seed drops into a hole that already has seeds, you scoop them up and keep sowing. On a screen, taking turns on six holes a side is much easier to follow, so we built that and gave it the congkak boat, cowrie shells and red saga seeds.

A bit of real mancala history

Congkak belongs to the mancala family, games where you sow seeds around rows of holes. The word mancala comes from the Arabic naqala, “to move.” Nobody knows where the first one was played. Some writers point to holes in a Stone Age floor at ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan, but other historians doubt those were game boards. At Gedera in Israel, archaeologists found mancala boards carved into stone benches at a potters’ workshop from the 3rd century AD.

Singapore’s National Library Board says the game is believed to have reached this region with traders and took root in Malacca, where at first it was played only at the royal court. It later spread among Malays and Peranakans, mostly women and children, and in Singapore it faded by the 1980s. One common explanation for the name is that congkak meant cowrie shell, a common counter. In Indonesia it is also called congklak or dakon, and in the Philippines, sungka.

Kalah is the American branch. William Julius Champion Jr., a Yale graduate, invented it around 1940, based, his family says, on ancient mancala games he had read about. He made sets in Mystic, Connecticut. In 2000, Geoffrey Irving, Jeroen Donkers and Jos Uiterwijk used computers to solve several versions of Kalah. Later work by Mark Rawlings showed that with four seeds a hole, the player who moves first can always win with perfect play. Against our animals, you always move first.

The animal ladder

• Gecko: picks any hole at random. 3 seeds a hole.
• Monkey: grabs the most seeds it can right now. 3 seeds a hole.
• Turtle: thinks 4 moves ahead. 4 seeds a hole.
• Owl: thinks 8 or more moves ahead. 4 seeds a hole.

How to play

• Tap a hole in your row, the bottom one. You pick up its seeds and drop one in each hole after it, counter-clockwise, including your store on the right but not the other store.
• If your last seed lands in your store, take another turn.
• If your last seed lands in an empty hole on your side, you capture it plus the seeds in the hole straight across, if there are any.
• When a row runs out, each side keeps the seeds left in its own row. Most seeds wins.
• Stars for a win: 3 by 10 seeds or more, 2 by 5 or more, 1 for any win. Beat an animal for its crown.
• Play the animals, or play 2 players on one device with 3 or 4 seeds a hole.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Count to your store. The hole next to your store needs 1 seed to land there, the one before it 2, and so on. The exact number gives you an extra turn.

Take extra turns from the right. If two holes both reach your store, play the one nearer the store first. Then the other hole still has the right count.

Watch the empty holes. An empty hole on your side across from a big pile is a capture waiting to happen. Check the other side’s empty holes too.

Your turn

The shells are counted and the boat is ready. Pick an animal or a friend, and play.