Door 14

Do you like the Mancala mechanism? I am sure you do! It is a really cool one. Let’s start with a short history lesson: according to Wikipedia Mancala is a family of 2-player strategy games played with small stones or beans placed in rows of holes in the earth or on a board. These games date back to ancient Egypt!

They are usually about capturing the opponent pieces, but it always involves players taking all of the tokens from a given spot, then placing them one by one to the next consecutive spots. This is the mechanism which also happens to be in some modern board games and I wish to see it in even more! Door 14 of our MechanXmas calendar highlights this lovely mechanism. 🥰

So, in modern board games you also pick up tokens from a space and then place them down one by one in different spaces, according to some movement rules. The last space where you place has a special significance.

The most obvious game of choice is of course is 🌙 Five Tribes, one of the most unique games in our collection. You randomly set up the board by laying out tiles and laying colored meeples on them. On your turn you will pick up every meeple from a space and place them down one by one on consecutive tiles. The last space has to have a meeple of the same color that you are placing there. This rule really restricts potential actions. Then you activate the actions of both the tile and the meeple, and remove that last meeple with its matching colored friends. If the tile is now empty, you claim it with your camel. Every meeple color has a different action and it scales based on the amount of meeples removed.

Another game I want to mention is 🏛️ Trajan. Trajan has the most fun action selection ever, where you pick up colored tokens from the action-rondel on your little player board and place them down in a clockwise order, activating the action where the last piece lands. Sometimes depending on where all the tokens are, certain actions will be unavailable. You also draft objective tiles that require you to have certain colored tokens in a spot. Brilliant stuff! 🤩