drwjkirkpatrick-web/kiothi-mancala-lesson

Kiothi — A traditional Meru mancala game from Kenya with pre-game setup, nki capture protection, and chain captures. Educational HTML game with AI and lesson plan. # Kiothi — Mancala of the Meru People 🇰🇪 An educational interactive tool for understanding game AI, built around **Kiothi**, a traditional Meru mancala board game from the slopes of Mount Kenya, featuring a unique pre-game setup phase, capture protection, and chain captures. ## What Is Kiothi? Kiothi (pronounced *kee-OH-thee*) is a mancala game played by the **Meru people** of central Kenya. The name means "to place" in Kimeru. It belongs to the ancient mancala family of games, played across Africa for over 1,000 years. Kiothi is distinguished by its pre-game redistribution phase and the *nki* capture-protection system — making it strategically the deepest of the three Kenyan games in this progression. ### How to Play - **Board**: Two rows of 10 pits (20 total), with 30 seeds per player - **Setup phase**: Each player picks one pit and redistributes those seeds freely across the board. After setup, all seeded pits are marked *nki* (capture-protected) - **Goal**: Capture more seeds than your opponent - **Sowing**: Pick up all seeds from one of your pits and drop them one-by-one — **counterclockwise only** (no direction choice) - **Relay sowing**: If your last seed lands in a non-empty pit, pick up those seeds and continue in the **same direction** - **Capture**: When your last seed lands in an **empty pit on your row** and you sowed through the opponent's row, capture the opposite pit's seeds (only if the opposite pit is not *nki*) - **Chain captures**: If you capture from your **leftmost pit**, also capture consecutive non-empty, non-nki pits beyond the opposite one - **Nki removal**: Sowing from a pit removes its *nki* protection — a strategic tradeoff - **Game end**: When a player can't move, the opponent takes all remaining seeds. Most seeds wins! ## What Makes This Different from Shisima/Giuthi? This is the third game in a progression teaching game AI concepts: | | Shisima | Giuthi | Kiothi | |---|---|---|---| | **Game type** | Alignment (3-in-a-row) | Ma …