Layli Goobalay is a traditional mancala

Mancala

Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes called "sowing" games, or "count-and-capture" games, which describes the game-play. Mancala games play a role in many African and some Asian societies comparable to that of chess in the West, or the game of Go in Eastern Asia...

 of Somaliland

Somaliland

Somaliland is an unrecognised self-declared sovereign state that is internationally recognised as an autonomous region of Somalia. The government of Somaliland regards itself as the successor state to the British Somaliland protectorate, which was independent for a few days in 1960 as the State of...

. The name of the game means "to exercise with circles". It is quite similar to the Enkeshui

Enkeshui

Enkeshui is a traditional mancala game played by the Maasai of both Kenya and Tanzania. It is a rather complex mancala game, and bears some similarities to the Layli Goobalay mancala played in Somaliland.-Equipment and gamesetup:...

 mancala played by the Maasai. Also Tampoduo and Ayo J'odu, played by children respectively in Ghana

Ghana

Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...

 and Nigeria

Nigeria

Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...

, are almost identical to Layli Goobalay.

Rules

Layli Goobalay is played on a 2x6 mancala board (i.e., 2 rows of 6 pits each) and 48 seeds. At game setup, 4 seeds are placed in each pit. These are exactly the same equipment and game setup used for other mancalas, most notably Wari

Wari

Wari may refer to:*Wari', Amerindian nation**Wari’ language, spoken by Wari'*Wari culture, Middle Horizon civilization that flourished in Peru*Wari Empire, political formation that emerged around AD500 in Peru...

.

At his or her turn, the player takes all the seeds from a pit and sows them counterclockwise. If the last seed of a sowing falls in a non-empty pit that is not a Uur (see below), relay-sowing applies. Thus, the player's turn ends when the last seed in a sowing is dropped in an empy pit or in a Uur pit. Depending on the pit where this last seed was dropped, the following situations may occur:

• if the pit is a Uur, nothing happens;
• if the pit is in the opponent's row, nothing happens;
• if the pit is the player's row, and the adjacent pit in the opponent's row is empty, nothing happens;
• if the pit is the player's row, and the adjacent pit in the opponent's row is non empty, the seeds in the opponent's pit are captured. This in turn may lead to two consequences:
  • if the opponent's pit contains 3 seeds, one of those seeds is captured and placed in the same pit as the capturing seed. The two pits involved in the capture thus will have 2 seeds each. Those are termed Uur (meaning "pregnant") and they now belong to the player who captured;
  • if the opponent's pit contains any other number of seeds, all those seeds as well as the capturing seed are removed from the game.

A player can never begin a sowing from Uur pits, and relay-sowing does not apply to Uur pits: as a consequence, the content of Uur pits tends to grow over time.

The game ends when one of the player cannot longer move. Both players then capture the seeds from their own Uurs (remember that a player can own an Uur in the opponent's row) and from the other pits in their own rows. The player who captured most seeds wins the game.

External links

Rules (by Jama Musse Jama)

• Rules