Players begin by placing a certain number of seeds, prescribed for the particular game, in each of the holes on the game board. Most Mancala games share a common general game play. The Nano-Wari board has eight seeds in just two pits Micro-Wari has a total of four seeds in four pits. The most minimalistic variants are Nano-Wari and Micro-Wari, created by the Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova. En Gehé (Tanzania) is played on longer rows with up to 50 pits (a total of 2x50=100) and uses 400 seeds. Tchouba employs a board of 160 (4x40) holes and needs 320 seeds. The largest are Tchouba (Mozambique) and En Gehé (Tanzania). Toguz Kumalak - extremely important in Central Asia, where it is considered a sport superior to Chess.Oware - close variants are played in the Caribbean and throughout western Africa, also in immigrant communities in North America and Europe.Kalah - the only modern game, which has become a popular pastime (mostly played in the USA, where it is simply known as 'Mancala', and Europe).Congkak - close variants in South Asia from the Maldives to the Philippines, known by many different names (e.g.Bao la Kiswahili - widespread along the east coast of Africa, and an integral part of Swahili culture one of the most difficult games to learn because of its rather complex rules.Some of the most popular mancala games (with regard to distribution area, and numbers of players, tournaments, and publications) are:. However, some names denote the same game, while some names are used for more than one game. More than 800 names of traditional mancala games are known, which are played in 99 countries, and almost 200 invented games have been described. Nobody knows the exact number of mancala variants. This word is used in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, but is not consistently applied to any one game. No one game exists with the name mancala the name is a classification or type of game. The word mancala comes from the Arabic word naqala meaning literally 'moved'. Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes called ' sowing' games, or 'count-and-capture' games, which describes the gameplay. Mancala → Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese.