Afro-Celt Mancala System (2007)

The Afro-Celt Mancala System is an abstract strategy game for Stonehenge: An Anthology Board Game, plus a few variants. As the name suggests, the game draws from the Kalah tradition, and certainly is a member of the Greater Mancala Family of Games. In the basic game, each player attempts to bear her discs off the outer ring of Stonehenge as quickly as possible, using the traditional Kalah sowing of discs from a "hole". In order to bear a disc off the board, it must land on a space of its color, or on a space that already has 10 discs in it. Play one round per player, and track their scores. First one out in a round gets 5 points; second, 4; et cetera, with last place getting 0. The bluffing variant allows players to keep their color a secret until the end of the round. In the gambling variant, the players have no colors. Instead, each turn, the player also takes a bar in the color they think will do best. For each color the player gets the color's score multiplied by the number of bars in that color she took. There are a handful of other minor variations, as well.