MiniMancala 2001

MiniMancala is one of the smallest non-trivial mancala games in existence, although Nano-Wari is smaller and Micro-Wari (played on a board of the same size) needs fewer seeds.

Each hole of the 2x2 board starts with 2 seeds. On his turn, a player distributes the contents of one of their holes, one by one, in a counterclockwise direction over the following holes. Seeds are never removed, so there are always 8 seeds in play.

If a player cannot do their turn because both their holes are empty, they lose.

Perfect play is a non-terminating draw, but imperfect humans often lose quickly against perfect play, even though you have at most 2 possible moves each turn!