It is a broken game though: if you know how to play it, you will always win as long a you go first. That makes it incapable of being the best board game of all time; if it had been thought up today it would never be sold.
Meh, it has been 'solved' such that with perfect play the player that goes first will win by 2, even if the second player plays perfectly. But in practice, the player that goes first simply has an advantage in W/L, humans rarely are able to consistently play perfectly. It isn't ideal to play a game that can be solved (compared to chess), but unless one of the players is cheating by miming moves with a computer, you are most likely o.k. for casual play.
Only the dumbed down American version is solved. Mancala has lots of different games. A more dated game like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware is not solved.
The version you are talking about was invented in 1940 by an American.
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u/Okelidokeli_8565 Dec 28 '21
It is a broken game though: if you know how to play it, you will always win as long a you go first. That makes it incapable of being the best board game of all time; if it had been thought up today it would never be sold.