How does a game of sowing seeds work, and has anyone solved it?

Mancala games work by sowing. You scoop every seed out of one pit, drop them one at a time into the pits that follow, and depending on where the last seed lands, you may capture some of your opponent's seeds. One turn is a little piece of counting, and the whole game is a long chain of them. Mancala is not one game but a family: more than 800 names are known, and some of them are the same game while others name several.

It is also a family that travelled. Bao is played across much of East Africa, Sungka is played from Indonesia to the Philippines, and the board can be nothing more than holes dug in the earth. Boards in Jordan have been claimed to be as old as 5,870 BC, though others dispute that, and the undisputed evidence is pottery boards and rock cuts from a Roman bathhouse, 2nd and 3rd century AD. The game also crossed the Atlantic: enslaved Africans brought it to the Americas and played it to foster community and develop social skills.

Can it be solved? A solved game is one where the result can be predicted from any position if both players play perfectly. For some mancala games that has been done. Most versions of Kalah, a modern variation first sold in the United States in the 1950s, are a win for whoever moves first, so the pie rule is sometimes used to balance it. The Oware variant that lets grand slams end the game was solved in 2002 and turned out to be a draw. A solved game can still be interesting to play if its solution is too complex to be memorized.