Mangala (game)
Traditional Turkish mancala game / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mangala is a traditional Turkish mancala game.[2] It is strictly related to the mancala games Iraqi Halusa, Palestinian Al-manqala, and Baltic German Bohnenspiel. There is also another game referred as Mangala played by the Bedouin in Egypt, and Sudan, but it has quite different rules.[citation needed]
The game can be traced in Ottoman miniatures starting from the 16th century.[3] According to the Turkish ethnologue Metin And, the "mancala" of The Arabian Nights (fifteenth night) could be directly related to this game.[4] It was first described in 1694 by British orientalist Thomas Hyde.[5] The game was also referred as Mangola in some later western works.[6]
The classic mangala game is still known in Turkey, but mangala played in Gaziantep, in Southern Anatolia, is more similar to Syrian mancala La'b Madjnuni (Crazy Game).[citation needed] There are many other mancala variants played in Anatolia: Pıç in Erzurum, Altıev in Safranbolu, Meneli Taş in Ilgın, etc.[7]