Kalakh

Kalakh is a small freeware DOS rendition of kalah, the best-known Western member of the ancient mancala family of board games. It was written in Russia in 1991 — hence the transliterated name — and it belongs to that class of tiny programs that travelled from floppy to floppy in the early nineties, with no box, no price tag and no ambitions beyond a good game.

The rules are among the oldest humanity has. The board holds two rows of six pits, plus one big store — the kalah — for each player. On your turn you empty one of your pits and sow its stones one by one, counter-clockwise around the board. Land the last stone in your own store and you move again; land it in an empty pit on your side facing an occupied enemy pit, and you capture those stones. Whoever banks more stones wins.

The appeal lies precisely in that simplicity. Kalah is a pure combinatorial game with no luck whatsoever: everything is visible, every line can be calculated, and well-built moves chain through bonus turns, so a strong player can shut a weaker one out of the game almost entirely. Your opponent here is a computer player the authors named Jinnee; you play with mouse or keyboard, and a match takes only a few minutes.

Do not expect any production values. The graphics are plain, there is a single screen with a board on it, and beyond the match itself the program offers nothing at all. It is the kind of software people once wrote for the sheer pleasure of it and gave away for free. As a quick logic game with your coffee, though, Kalakh holds up fine — and if you have never tried mancala, one game is all it takes to learn.

You can play it on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, nothing to install.