NAME¶
mancala - simple board game for human player and computer
SYNOPSIS¶
mancala level-top level-bottom number-of-stones
xmancala [-stones N]
mancala-text
DESCRIPTION¶
This manual page documents briefly the
mancala and
xmancala
commands. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
because the original program does not have a manual page.
mancala runs the game in the console, while
xmancala is a fancy
X-interface.
mancala-text is a shell script to run mancala in a console
from the Debian menu system.
When run as
xmancala the program has no options, and should be
self-explanatory. Built in buttons and sliders control the difficulty level
(default 4), and bring up the rules of the game.
The console version,
mancala, has no access to the rules, and the
difficulty level can only be set on the command line (see below). When it is
your turn to play, you enter the letter of the cell that you want to move the
stones from,
A to
F (case insensitive). The rules are contained
in the file
/usr/share/doc/mancala/RULES.
OPTIONS¶
When run as
mancala, the program normally takes two arguments,
level-top and
level-bottom, one of which should be
0 to
represent the human player (you), and the other should be in the range
1 to
9, to represent the skill level of the computer player. The
first argument represents the top player, who starts.
Alternatively, you can give a single argument or two non-zero arguments, to
watch the computer playing itself, or two zero arguments, to play against
another human player on the same console.
For the console version, you can add a third argument to specify the number of
stones per hole. For xmancala you can specify the number of stones per hole
using the -stones N argument.
On Debian systems, the shell script
mancala-text is provided to
facilitate running mancala in a console, from the Debian menu system. This
script will run mancala with a difficulty level of 4, and will pause when the
game is finished, to enable the player to view the final screen.
SEE ALSO¶
<http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala>
AUTHOR¶
This manual page was written by Andrew Gray <ajpg@debian.org> for the
Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).