Mancala strategy

Count your pits from the left. The third pit holds four seeds and is four steps from the store, so it lands in the store: a free extra move. Take it first, every game. Then play the sixth pit. Its five seeds land in the store and along the far side. With perfect play, that pair wins by 8 seeds for the first player.

Playing the first pit or the second pit first loses by 14 and 10 with perfect play. The table below gives every first move.

A pit that holds exactly as many seeds as its distance from the store lands in the store. Pit six with one seed, pit five with two, pit four with three, and so on. Set up several of these and you can play them one after another, each giving another move. A lap is one trip round the board. The longest chain possible on a six-pit board is seventeen moves, as noted in the Kalah article on Wikipedia.

A capture takes the opposite pit plus your last seed. The biggest captures come late, when the opponent has let a pit fill up across from one of your empty pits. Keep an empty pit on your side and count whether any of your pits lands exactly there.

The defence is the same count in reverse: do not leave a full pit across from an empty pit that the opponent can reach.

Seeds left on your row go to your store when the opponent runs out. So it can pay to keep seeds in your rightmost pits and let the opponent empty their row first. The opponent's answer is to keep sowing onto your row so that you have to move. Watch the count on both rows in the last ten moves; that is where most games are decided.

In Oware, keep your pits at one or four seeds where you can. Pits of two or three risk capture. A big pit that laps the board is a weapon, because it can land where you choose. In Congklak, the long sowing turns mean the first pit you pick decides everything; count the full path before you touch the board.