Free companion
Mancala, the National Game of Africa
Free material for Culin's 1894 paper: two boards at playing size to print, all three complete games on a single sheet you can keep beside the board, the register that separates what he watched from what he was told, and every one of the twenty-two illustrations he published listed with the provenance he recorded for it.
The Valice edition is built, validated and priced but not yet on sale — creating the payment product is a live write that is held behind a founder action. Everything on this page is free and works today regardless.
Print and play
Free, no sign-up, reprint as often as you like.
Two mancala boards to print and play on
PDF · US Letter · 2 pagesThe two-row board of fourteen holes for the Syrian games, and the four-row board for Chuba. Drawn at playing size, with cups large enough to hold a stack of coins. Beans, coins or shells will do for counters; the game has always been played with whatever was to hand.
Open PDFAll three games, on one sheet
PDF · US Letter · 1 pageLa'b madjnuni — the crazy game, whose result is fixed by the opening layout — its companion la'b akila, and Chuba. Culin sets his rules out as prose in the middle of an argument; here they are set out to be played from, and every place he leaves something unsaid says so.
Open PDFA Register of Record and Inference
PDF · US Letter · 1 pageWhat Culin watched in Washington Street, what a lad from Damascus told him, what he read in Lane and Hyde, and what he concluded from the three — kept apart on one page. A short paper moves between them inside a single sentence, which is exactly when it matters.
Open PDFThe objects he figured
PDF · US Letter · 1 pageAll twenty-two captions from the illustrations this edition does not reproduce, in Culin's own wording, with the museum numbers and the provenance he recorded — a catalogue of the boards a curator could put his hands on in Philadelphia in 1894.
Open PDF
About this material
Stewart Culin died in 1929 and the 1896 United States imprint puts this text in the public domain there on its own. None of the paper's five plates or fifteen text figures is reproduced: no photographer and no draughtsman is named for any of them, so nothing on this page is taken from them. Both boards were drawn for this edition from the counts in Culin's own text — fourteen holes and ninety-eight counters for the Syrian games, four rows for Chuba.