Mancala

Mancala is a long plank of warm teak with twelve scooped pits and a deep store at each end, laid out on a woven raffia mat with a cup of tea going cold beside it. The seeds are glass beads in amber, jade, cobalt, ruby and clear, and they pile up in the hollows exactly the way real ones do. Pick up everything in one of your pits and the game walks it round the board anticlockwise, one bead to a pit, with a small clatter each time a bead lands.

The standard game is Kalah. Your own store gets a bead as you pass it, the other player's is always skipped, and if your very last bead falls into your store you sow again — two or three extra turns in a row is where games are won. Drop your last bead into an empty pit on your own row and you sweep it up together with everything in the pit facing it. When one row runs dry the other player gathers up whatever is left, and the deeper store takes it. Settings hold three, four or six beads a pit and the house rules people actually argue about, including what happens to the leftovers.

There is a full Oware in there too: no sowing into the stores, a capture whenever your last bead makes an enemy pit two or three, the chain back along the row, the grand-slam rule and the duty to keep the other row fed. Play a friend on the same device — on a phone the board stands upright so you each sit at your own store with your name the right way up — or take on the computer at Easy, Normal or Sharp, which searches ten moves deep while you are still counting. Tap a pit to sow, hold one to see exactly where the last bead lands, undo when you miscount, and turn the numbers on only if you want them.