This module aims at understanding and presenting games and gaming as witnesses of culture and, as such, sources of cultural history. But how could the study of games support the historian to understand and analyse a past culture?
Mancala is a very old family of strategy board games, still played in various parts of the world (in more than one hundred variations). What makes Mancala interesting for this module is something related to its gameplay: cheating. Cheating is of course not allowed by the rules of the game. But in specific places of the world, cheating has become an almost inseparable part of Mancala’s gameplay. Not only because players have developed varying techniques of cheating, but mainly because players caught are not stigmatized for cheating, but for having been detected.
This is one of the cultural elements of Mancala presented in this video. For more, click and watch!