Many believe that Mancala is the oldest played game in the world. However, where does it stand today?
Mancala is actually a family of games that share a common origin or play style. Mancala style games consist of over 800 names or versions from over 90 countries.
Today we are going to concentrate on some of the most popular variants as reported by Google Trends.
The Google search engine recognizes Mancala, Kalah, Pallanguzhi as games, however, Oware and Omweso were only identified as keyword search terms.
Not surprisingly both Mancala and Kalah far exceed search interest over time. Another interesting trend is the apparent decline in search interest from 2004 to 2008 across all of our game name search terms.