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Are you aware of Oh!Ware? I’m guessing not. The deckbuilder has been on Steam for about a week as of this writing, with a humble 23 reviews to its name so far. It caught my eye though, because the fundamental mechanic underneath the very 2026 trappings of a roguelike structure and marbles standing in for cards is mancala—a slightly older board game you probably played at some point in your childhood.
And by “slightly older,” I mean somewhere between 1,500 and 7,000 years older.
I was probably predisposed to love mancala as a kid: My dad was a big backgammon guy, and mancala is a lot like backgammon, but played with marbles or similar shiny colored glass pieces. (Kids still like shiny colored glass baubles in the TikTok era, right? I’m very out of touch.) What I didn’t know about mancala until today is that it may be the oldest board game in recorded history, but precisely when and where it was invented is still undetermined.
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“Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on the archaeological evidence found in Jordan that dates around 6000 BC,” summarizes Wikipedia. But other, more concrete evidence of the game, as dug up by archaeologists, is thousands of years newer—around 500-600 AD. Mancala isn’t definitively the oldest board game, then, with ancient competition from the likes of senet and mehen, but it’s an OG regardless.
And now also a roguelike, though “deckbuilder” seems a bit off since the game is played with marbles. Does that make it a bagbuilder?
On booting up Oh!Ware’s demo and skipping past the tutorial like I was hot shit, I realized I have not played mancala in at least 25 years and had no idea what I was doing. But I clicked a bunch to move some marbles around, collected mana(?) and killed a spider, who I really don’t think had any business playing a board game that requires opposable thumbs. Then I was offered the archetypical pick three, but with amusing choices including “blessing marble” and “aggro marble.”
I need to go study up on mancala now, but if anyone plays Oh!Ware, please let me know if I should aim for an aggro meta or a blessing meta. I really don’t want to lose my marbles.
