The Cardamom Game
Will Manidis wrote a piece of historical fiction about a medieval game played with spice on 11×11 limestone boards: green cardamom from the south, black cardamom from the north. The player chooses where the spice moves, but the quantity “was not determined by the player’s choice. It was determined by the condition, al-hāl, of the surrounding positions.
One move could cascade across the whole board.
The game never existed, so this is a reconstruction of a fiction: I kept everything the text specifies:
- the 121 depressions
- the two cardamoms
- condition-driven quantities
- the cascades
- games that can finish in an afternoon
The rules that came out of it (loosely based on Mancala whenever I couldn’t figure out what to do):
Making a move. On your turn, choose one cell you control and one cell next to it. You move pods from the first cell into the second.
How many pods move. The move always carries one pod. Then add one more pod for each neighbouring cell that holds at least as many pods as the cell you are moving from. However, you can never move more pods than the cell actually contains. In practice this means: a cell surrounded by equally large or larger piles sends out many pods at once; a pile with no crowded neighbours sends out just one pod per move; and a cell holding only a single pod always moves that one pod, no matter how crowded its surroundings are.
Capturing. If you move onto an enemy cell with a number of pods equal to or greater than the number already there, you capture that cell. Every pod on the captured cell is sold at market and scores you one point each.
Selling at the far market. If you move pods all the way into the market row on the far side of the board, they sell for two points each.
Overburdened cells. A cell that reaches six pods is overburdened. It collapses, and one bean of spice is thrown to each neighbouring cell. If this pushes a neighbouring cell to six pods, that cell collapses too, and the chain continues. These collapses happen automatically after your move, and they can help or hurt you.
Ending the game. The game ends at sunset, after 120 moves. The player with the most points wins.
You can play a friend at the same board, or one of two opponents: the Merchant, who grabs what is in front of him, and the Sage, a minimax search that reads the board a few moves deep.