KOCHI: Anandalakshmi remembers playing Ali Guli Mane. “There was no electricity in those days, and we used to play in the dark with friends and family. It always led to squabbles when we would cheat by sowing two seeds instead of one,” says the 77-year-old homemaker in Karnataka.
Ali Guli Mane, a two-player strategy board game of the Mancala family, is popular with both the young and old. Bearing resemblance to Pallanguzhi of Tamil Nadu, Ali Guli Mane is played with a wooden block with pits.
This game is said to have originated from rural India, where sowing and reaping is a part of life. The aim is to capture maximum number of seeds. When it starts, a player uses two rows of seven pits each. Each player owns the row closest to him/her.
The game starts with 70 pieces, with 5 in each hole. In every turn, you remove all seeds from a hole and distributes them either clockwise or anti-clockwise, as you choose. Once you place the last seed, you take all the seeds in the next hole, and repeat the placement process sequentially. If the next hole is empty (saada), you take all the seeds in the hole next to the empty one as well as those in the hole opposite to it. When all your seeds are taken, you lose.
“I often played Alu Guli Mane with my friends and grandmother during summer vacations. We used to cheat my grandmother by making her look elsewhere and miss our moves,” laughs 51-year-old Sujatha, a homemaker.
Ali Guli Mane is said to stimulate hand-eye coordination, improve counting and logical thinking skills, and boost concentration. Cheat codes that could come in handy are dropping a piece in a hole and pre-calculating the total number of seeds or the opponent’s moves. Mysuru-based Ramsons Kala Pratishthana, an art foundation, attempts to revive traditional games and restore its former glory. “Traditional games improve interpersonal communication. They teach you to treat success and failure in equal measure,” explains Raghu Dharmendra, designer of the foundation.