Games: Pits & Pebbles

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Carved on a vast block of rock in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo are two facing ranks of six shallow pits with larger hollows scooped out at each end. The same design is carved on columns of the temple at Karnak in Egypt, and it appears in early tomb paintings in the valley of the Nile. It is carved in the steps of the Theseum in Athens, and in rock ledges along caravan routes of the ancient world. Today the same pits and hollows are to be found all over Asia and Africa, scratched in the bare earth, carved in rare woods or ivory inlaid with gold. And they are turning up in rapidly increasing numbers in the U.S.-in public playgrounds, on town-house coffee tables, and even in the programmings of computers.

The design is the basis of one of the oldest games in the world, ancestor of the abacus and of backgammon, dominoes and mah-jongg. Its most popular U.S. incarnation-called Kalah-is the life work of a spry 82-year-old retired financial counselor, who is suddenly hard put to keep up with the demand.

The Ur-Game. In 1905, the year he graduated from Yale, William Champion read an article about an exhibit of African game boards at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 in which the author noted that Kalah "has served for ages to divert the inhabitants of nearly half the inhabited area of the globe." Fascinated by the failure of such a pandemic pastime to catch on in the U.S. and Europe, Champion began tracing its migrations and permutations.

He found an urn painting of Ajax and Achilles playing it during the siege of Troy; he found African chieftains playing for stakes of female slaves, and maharajahs using rubies and star sapphires as counters. He finally traced it back some 7,000 years to the ancient Sumerians, who evolved the six-twelve-sixty system of keeping numerical records." Out of this system of record keeping, the Sumerians developed this ur-game of board games.

Matches or Diamonds. The two players sit behind the two ranks of six pits on the board between them. Each pit contains three (for beginners) or six "pebbles" (which may be anything from matches to diamonds). Purpose of the game is to accumulate as many pebbles as possible in the larger bin (kalah) to each player's right. Each player in turn picks up all the pebbles in any one of his own six pits and sows them, one in each pit, around the board to the right, including, if there are enough, his own kalah, and on into his opponent's pits (but not his kalah). If the player's last counter lands in his own kalah, he gets another turn, and if it lands in an empty pit on his own side, he captures all his opponent's counters in the opposite pit and puts them in his kalah together with the capturing pebble. The game is over when all six pits on one side or another are empty. It is not always an advantage for a player to go "out," since all pebbles in the pits on the opposite side go into the opponent's kalah. The score is determined by who has the most pebbles.