Game: Swahili
Company: Milton-Bradley, Copyright 1968
Type of game: Abstract Strategy
Number of players: 2-4
Playing time: 20-30 minutes

There is an interesting story behind how I managed to get this game. I was looking over EBay, and I saw Swahili. It looked like an oddball title. My friend Mike, at the time, had this game called "Shake Up", which looked similar. I figured I would take a shot on the game, so I bid on it and won it. I opened it up, and found out it was actually a Mancala variant, with a few twists I never saw before in any Mancala style game. The game feels like Mancala meets a diceless version of Backgammon.

I finally got to play it with my friend Jeff and he liked it. He liked it so much, he actually bid on EBay and won his own copy of it. I also know someone else who tried it at my local Wargaming/gaming group who also liked it and played it also. Swahili is a game dating back to the late 1960s. You will find it on EBay on occasion. I have seen it several times. You know you have the game if you see the name, see it is by Milton-Bradley, and also see references to African culture (the game says it is from "The Cultural Heritage of Africa", which is nothing more than a reference to Mancala).

The game has 4 bases along the outside of the 12" by 12" board, 4 bins to put captured pieces in and multiple grooved rows that lead up to a large pit in the middle. If you can imagine a volcano with groves cut into it, you have some idea what the game board looks like. Each player has 12 pieces they stack in their first 4 rows of your safe area, three in each row. The pieces look like tiny statues and their bases fit in the grooves on the board.

The object of Swahili is to score the most points before a single player is out of pieces (they are either captured or in the pit in the middle). During your turn, you activate a single row and sow the pieces forward toward the pit on the top/middle of the game board, one piece per level, advancing until you put your last piece down. At this point, you can choose to continue, if you have more than one piece in the row you landed on (repeating the process), or stop. If you stop, and an opponent or opponent has a single piece of theirs, you can capture it (if it is past the first 6 rows on the outside of the board). If an opponent has 2 or more pieces in the row, you can't capture them.

This process of continuing to sow pieces can continue until you land a piece in a row that has none of your pieces in it, or you choose to stop. Players sow their pieces up to the pit in the middle of the board. Once the pit is hit, the player drops one of their pieces in the pit and then start again in their first row on the outside. Players score 10 points for each piece that lands in the pit, and 5 points for each opponent's piece they capture. The winner is the player who has the most points once one player is out of pieces.

These simple set of rules lead to a game that has a definite German style game feel to it. You are always confronted with choices. Do you rush to advance or slowly advance, making sure your pieces are protected. Do you stop or continue sowing? In addition, while there is no luck involved in the game, the game does generate its dose of unpredictability. You may think you are going to lose, but manage to pull the game out in the end game. All these leads to a game that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

I like this game a lot. I have played it nu-merous times and have yet to formulate a winning strategy to it. I see there are sound principles that need to be followed in the game, but every approach seems to have a counter to it. The game confronts a player with counter-intuitive tactics that are needed. Like, after playing the game several times, counter intuitively, madly rushing forward to get to the top actually has a defensive element to it. Doing this allows you to get pieces back into your first few rows so you can sneak up on your opponent from behind who is lagging.

Now, there are a few nits about the game. One, there is what I dub the "Captain Miller Syndrome" (in reference to the movie "Saving Private Ryan"). The little statues pieces tend to fall over, particularly if your hand shakes, like mine does (think of Captain Miller from Private Ryan). It is annoying.

A second nit is that the game can be argued to have what looks like a politically incorrect tone to it. It is supposed to pay tribute to African Culture, but the pieces look stereotyped. In addition, some twisted mind can think the point of the game is march African tribesmen into a volcano for points (the board does look like a volcano). One other nit has to do with the rules. Some things are not spelled out as well as they could be. Like the rules regarding how many times you can continue to resow pieces and whether multiple captures could occur if you can resow. We managed to piece it together, but the rules are vague enough to allow multiple interpretations. This is a minor nit, however.

All and all, Swahili makes a great 20-30 minute strategy filler game. The game's components are a bit larger than what usually fits as a filler game, as far as game size goes, but still worth having.

Richard Hutnik has an opposable thumb. For that reason, we hope to see more writing from him and similarly qualified people in the very near future.