Togyz kumalak
Togyz kumalak ( German nine balls ), common German transcription Togus Kumalak , is a game from the Mancala family that is very popular in Kazakhstan .
Style of play
The game is played on a board that has nine pits in two rows . At the beginning of the game, nine balls are placed in each of the 18 game hollows, making a total of 162. When it is your turn, you take all but one of the balls out of one of your hollows and distribute one ball counter-clockwise to the other hollows. If it only contains one ball, it can be played in the next hole. If the last ball fills the contents of an opponent's hollow to an even number of balls, the player may push it into his Kazan, the "bowl" next to the opposing hollow. In addition, once in a game, an opposing hollow can be caught, which is then called "Tusdik". All balls that fall into a tusdik while being distributed belong to the player who made the tusdik. The game ends at the latest when it is a player's turn but can no longer move. The balls that are still in the normal game hollows at the end belong to the player on whose side of the board they are. The winner is whoever caught the most balls. Usually, however, a game is ended when a player has 82 balls or more (i.e. more than half). If each player has caught 81 balls, the game is a tie.
history
Research today assumes that the game reached Kazakhstan on the Silk Road around the 16th century . From there it is said to have penetrated via Mongolia to the Kazakh settlement areas in western China and eastern Afghanistan . The doctor and ethnologist Richard Karutz describes in his 1911 book Unter Kirgisen und Turkmenen on page 83 this game as one that is often played among the Kyrgyz .
Championships
National championships have been held in Kazakhstan since 1948. During the Soviet era , the game was not so popular with the public. After their withdrawal at the beginning of the 1990s , that changed again.
In November 2010 the first world championship took place in Astana , in which athletes from sixteen nations took part. First place went to Galymcan Temirbayev (Kazakhstan). In 2012, the second world championship, won by Khakimzhan Eleusinov , took place in Pardubice, Czech Republic . The fifth World Cup took place in Turkey in 2019.
The Togyzkumalak European Championship took place in Schweinfurt in July 2018 . There were other tournaments in Germany, including in Augsburg and Sinzig.
literature
- Richard Karutz : Among the Kirghiz and Turkmen , Ullstein, 1911 Archive.org
Web links
- Website of the Kazakh Togyzkumalak Association Kazakh
- Togyz Kumalak on Mancala World
- Togyzkumalak on Iggamecenter.com
- Explanatory video in English