Kalaha
Kalaha , in the English- speaking area Kalah , in the German-speaking area also called Steinchenspiel , is a modern strategy game of the Mancala family (from Arabic:نقل / naqala / 'transport, transport') for two players. Mancala (also: Mankala, Manqala) is the scientific generic term (generic term) for a group of board games in which the contents of hollows are redistributed according to certain rules. The term bean games is also used in Germany .
history
The game was invented in 1940 by the US tax advisor William Julius Champion (1880–1972) in Mystic , Connecticut . He got the idea for this as early as 1905 when he read an article at Yale University ( New Haven , Connecticut) about the World's Fair in Chicago (1893) , in which mancala games were reported. The game first appeared on the US market in 1944 and was produced from 1958 by the Kalah Game Company founded by Champion for this purpose . Champion patented his game in 1952 (design) and 1955 (rules) . The brand name was protected in the USA from 1970 to 2002. Nevertheless, it found many imitators, including Conference (Mieg's, 1965), Sahara ( Pelican , 1976) and Bantumi (on Nokia - mobile phones since 2000).
Kalaha is almost identical to Dakon ( Java ) and Congkak ( Malaysia ), two Asian variants of Mancala. The biggest difference is that in Kalaha the turn ends when the last seed is distributed , while in the Malay games the turn continues when the last seed is placed in a filled hole. The most important similarities are that the profit hollows are taken into account when distributing the seeds and bonus moves follow when the last seed falls into your own profit hollows.
The first Kalaha computer program was developed by Wiley at MIT in 1960 . In 1978 Paul Erich Frielinghaus came 5th in the national youth research competition with his Kalaha program (he called the game Serata). A Kalaha program, written in the FORTRAN programming language , was also developed by Wolfgang Stahn in 1978/79, who came second in the national youth research competition in 1980, but who then won this prize with Kai Himstedt with a chess program . The Kalaha variants with up to six stones per hollow and board sizes up to six hollows were developed by Donkers et al. resolved in 2001, with the exception of Kalaha (6, 6). In a perfect game, the attractive player usually wins, but there are also constellations in which the player who follows has an advantage or the game ends in a draw.
A large Kalaha tournament with 32 participants was held in 1963 at the Coolidge School in Holbrook , Massachusetts (USA). It was won by Ira Burnim. Today there are more than 50 Kalaha tournaments in the US each year, mostly organized by schools, youth centers, museums and libraries. Kalaha is used by the Kellog Electronic Research Academy in Chicago to promote students with dyscalculia .
In Germany there were Kalaha projects at the Friedrich-Rückert-Oberschule in Berlin , the Lambertischule in Coesfeld , the Erich-Klausener-Gymnasium in Adenau and the Kindergarten St. Benedikt in Hanover.
The oldest mancala game boards were found in the northwest of Ethiopia near Matara and Yeha and date from around the 6th to 8th centuries . Century n. Chr . Rows of troughs have also been discovered in the temple district of Kurna (1400 BC), Egypt , on Cyprus and in various places in Sri Lanka , but to this day it is not known whether these are game boards at all, and if so, what games were played on it. Dating these finds is also extremely difficult. The rows of hollows at Kurna were probably not created until 1700 years after the temple was built, as Coptic crosses were probably also engraved nearby at the same time. Nevertheless, it is said again and again that Mancala games are “5000 years old”, which can safely be described as a modern myth . In this way, Champion tried to increase the sales of his game.
Despite the very simple rules of the game, Kalaha offers many tactical options.
regulate
material
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The Kalaha game board consists of two rows of pits, each with six pits . In addition, there is a larger profit trough at each end , also called a Kalah , which receives the captured seeds during the course of the game. Each player owns the six game pits on his side of the board and the winning pit on his right. In addition, you need at least 36 small stones.
preparation
At the beginning of the game, all of the game hollows are filled with three or four seeds each. Usually the last winner starts the new game.
target
The aim of the game is to collect more seeds than your opponent. Since there are only 36 seeds, 19 is enough to achieve this. Since there is an even number of seeds, a tie is possible if both players end up owning 18 seeds.
Gameplay
Example round:
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The player on the bottom starts from the highlighted play pit to distribute the seeds.
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Since the last seed has fallen into its winch, it gets an extra round.
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The last seed has fallen into an empty playing pit opposite a filled pit, so the player below gets the highlighted seeds.
The players' rounds consist of moving the seeds in the hollows. When it is a player's turn, he chooses one of his game hollows, takes its contents and distributes it counter-clockwise into the following hollows. A seed is placed in each hollow, except in the opposing winning hollow.
Extra round
When the last seed ends up in their own profit slot, the active player wins an extra round (or: bonus turn). The player can repeat this several times and then continue playing.
To catch
If the last seed ends up in an empty playing hole of the active player and there are one or more seeds directly opposite in the opponent's hole, both the last seed and the seeds opposite are caught and are placed in the winning hole with your own seeds.
Playing
The game ends when all of a player's pits are empty after a move. The other player also empties his gambling hole and puts the seeds in his winning hole. The winner is whoever has the most seeds in his / her profit pocket.
variants
Instead of three seeds, you can also play with four, five or six seeds per well. This makes the game much more challenging. Computer scientists also examined other board sizes with one to six stones per cavity. Another variant is Cross-Kalah, which was invented by the American W. Dan Troyka in 2001.
See also
literature
- Kalah: Pit & Pebbles. In: Time Magazine. June 14, 1963, p. 67.
- Kalah recognized as valuable educational Aid - 350 Students participate in Tournament: Kalah sweeps Coolidge School. In: Melrose Free Press. December 19, 1963.
- AG Bell: Kalah on Atlas . In: D. Mitchie (ed.): Machine Intelligence 3 . University Press, Edinburgh (Scotland) 1968, pp. 181-193.
- RL Brill: A Project for the Low-Budget Mathematics Laboratory: The Game of Kalah. In: Arithmetic Teacher. Volume 21, February 1974, pp. 659-661.
- WJ Champion: Game Board (US D165,634) . United States Patent Office (USA), Washington DC January 8, 1952. (Portal)
- WJ Champion: Game Counter (US 2,720,362) . United States Patent Office (USA), Washington DC October 11, 1955. (Portal)
- WJ Champion: New or old (letter). Kalah Game Company, Holbrook MA (USA) 1970.
- WE Ching: Analysis of Kalah (PDF; 542 kB). Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore 2000/2001.
- RE de La Cruz, CE Cage, M.-GJ Lian: Let's play Mancala and Sungka: Learning Math and social Skills through ancient multicultural Games. In: Teaching Exceptional Children. Volume 32, No. 3, 2000, pp. 38-42.
- J. Donkers, J. Uiterwijk, G. Irving: Solving Kalah (PDF; 83 kB). In: ICGA Journal. Volume 23, No. 3, 2000, pp. 139-147.
- E. Lehmann, K. Hicke, V. Juhre: Kalaha project: complete documentation. Rückert-Oberschule, Berlin 2000. ( ddi.cs.uni-potsdam.de ( Memento from December 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ))
- H. Machatscheck: Brick by brick: exoticism of board games . Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1984, OCLC 74675088 , pp. 69 & 84-87.
- M. Neumeister: Case-based learning of assessment functions (diploma thesis) . University of Leipzig, Leipzig November 9, 1998.
- WC. Oon, Y.-J. Lim: An Investigation on Piece Differential Information in Co-Evolution on Games Using Kalah. In: Proceedings of Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Volume 3, 2003, pp. 1632-1638. ( yewjin.com ( memento from January 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
- I. Pok Ai Ling: The Game of Kalah (PDF; 353 kB). Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore 2000/2001.
- H. Reutter: African Game teaches Math Strategies to Students. In: Grand Island Independent. January 31, 2004. ( theindependent.com ( Memento of October 31, 2004 in the Internet Archive ))
- R. Russel: Kalah: The Game and the Program. In: Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, Memo. No. 22, University of Stanford, Stanford (USA) 1964.
- JR Slagle, JK Dixon: Experiments with the M&N Tree-Searching Program. In: Communications of the ACM. Volume 13, No. 3, 1970, pp. 147-154.
- C. Zaslavsky: Africa counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture . Prindle, Weber & Schmidt, Boston (USA) 1974, ISBN 0-87150-160-0 , p. 328.