Sungka: The Filipino version of the board game mancala
Sungka, pronounced soong-kah, is a traditional Filipino game where two players compete to capture the majority of the shells.
The game is typically played on a long, wooden board that has 9 holes. Each player has seven smaller holes (houses) in front of him and two large holes (head) at each end of the board. Seven shells are distributed evenly among the 14 small pits.
Both players start by taking the shells from one of the houses on their own side and distributing them in each consecutive hole around the board in a counter-clockwise direction. The player puts a shell in their own large hole on the left side of the board but excludes the large hole of their opponent when distributing the shells.
If the last shell drops into a pit with other shells, the shells in the hole are picked up and distributed in the same counter-clockwise direction. If the last shell drops into the player’s head, then the player can distribute the shells from another house on his side.
If a shell is dropped into an empty house, the player’s turn is over and his opponent can choose a pile of shells from his side of the board to distribute. If the shell is dropped in an empty house on the player’s side, the contents of the pit on the opposite side are taken and added to the player’s head.
When there are no more shells left to play, the player with the most number of shells wins the game. There are variations of sungka that allow the winner certain privileges when continuing the game. In one variation, the player fills the houses with the shells he accumulated. If the player doesn’t have seven shells to fill a house, they go back into the player’s head. Any houses that aren’t filled are burned and cannot be used in the game by either player. The winner starts the next round and the game continues until one player’s side has been completely burned.
Sungka is considered to be the Filipino version of the mancala game, which dates back to the seventeenth century, according to an American Museum of Natural History’s research note. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives and the Philippines share a particular set of rules in their version of the game.
The AMNH note titled “Philippine Sungka and Cultural Contact in Southeast Asia, says that in 1617, Father Jose Sanchez, traveled with the Spanish to the Philippines and mentioned a game called kunggit in which players distributed shells across a row of bins on a wooden board. However, the rules of the game Sanchez found were not described in enough detail to conclude that the game is the same as the one played today. Stewart Culin, an American ethnologist, was the first to mention and describe the rules of sungka in a report called “Philippine games” in 1900. Culin’s rules of the game, however, were incomplete. Complete rules of sungka were documented by Filipino librarian Gabriel A. Bernardo in 1937.
As of February, the House of Representatives in the Philippines is a step closer to passing a bill that would preserve traditional indigenous games like sungka, according to the Inquirer.
GMA News says the bill titled “Philippine Indigenous Games Preservation Act” aims to “preserve the rich cultural heritage of Filipino indigenous peoples and promote the significance of traditional games in uplifting the wellbeing, especially of the youth.”
The proposed bill calls for the staging of annual and regional national indigenous sports competitions. It also calls for indigenous games to be included in the school curriculum.
According to the ANMH report, Filipino expatriates have taken sungka to other destinations to play. There have been reports of sungka being played in large immigrant Filipino communities in Guam and Taiwan.
References
- “Bill proposes battle of ‘sungka,’ etc.” by DJ Yap fro the Inquirer.
- “How well do Pinoy kids know sungka? This bill aims to ‘preserve’ the traditional game” from GMA News.
- “Philippine Games” by Stewart Culin.
- “Philippine Sungka and Cultural Contact in Southeast Asia”
