Kalaha Game Free

kalah Kalaha & Mancala world

Kalaha was invented by William Julius Champion Jr., a graduate of Yale University, in 1940.

In 1905, he came across an article about a mancala game and it appears that he read many more ethnological works on African and Asian mancala games in later years. W. J. Champion started to sell his game in 1944, patented it in 1952 (design) and 1955 (rules) and then founded in 1958 the Kalah Game Company in Holbrook, Massachusetts (USA).

Kalah was produced by them well into the 1970s and the name of the game was a registered trademark from 1970-2002. Champion promoted the game for educational purposes. On August 9, 1961, he organized a tournament at Fiske playground in Wellesley MA. In 1963, there was a Kalah championship with 32 students organized at the Coolidge School in Holbrook MA, which was won on December 12 by Ira Burnim.

In 1959, Kalah became the first remotely played computer game, when it was programmed by MIT students for the DEC’s PDP-1 computer. Many other computerized versions followed. In Germany, Paul Erich Frielinghaus, today a well-known actor, but at this time still a High School student, developped in 1978 a Kalah program (he called the game Serata), which won the first prize in the German Research Competition Jugend forscht (i.e. "youth is doing research"). The game was strongly solved (according to Allis definition) for small instances using full-game databases and weakly for larger instances by Jeroen Donkers et al. in 2001 and by Anders Carstensen in 2011. Starting in 2015 Mark Rawlings (Gaithersburg, Maryland; USA) has written a computer program to extensively analyze both the "standard" version of Kalah and the "empty capture" version, which is the primary variant. If played perfectly, it is usually (it depends on the number of seeds in each hole, the number of holes per row, and the variant) a first players win.

The Swedish Björn Myrvold has written in 2002 a strong Kalah applet.

Although the game was patented, it had been copycatted many times: Conference (Mieg's, 1965), Sahara (Pelikan, 1976) and Bantumi (Nokia, 2000). Kalah is used by the Kellog Electronic Research Academy in Chicago to help students who are suffering under dyscalculia.

Kalah is very popular in the United States, where it is often just called Mancala. In Germany, it is known as Kalaha. Every year there are more than 50 tournaments in the USA, mostly for children.

The game has no African origins despite many claims to the contrary, even by its inventor, because there is no such game in the whole of Africa. However, Kalah suspiciously resembles games played by the Malay people and could be described as single-lap Dakon (Dakon is a Javanese mancala game). Kalah means in Timorese "to defeat". All modern mancala variants, which were commercialized in western countries before 1960, are minor modifications of traditional games. Although they often claim to be ancient, it can be shown that they are, in fact, of rather recent origin. Kalah is for sure not a Sumerian invention, 7,000 years old, as stated by W. J. Champion.

The version called Conference, published in Germany, was inspired by boards kept in Castle Weikersheim.

reference http://mancala.wikia.com/wiki/Kalah