Games: Pits & Pebbles

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.

A sophisticated player learns not to accept all short-term advantages, however tempting. Thus, in the game illustrated, Player A began by moving the three pebbles in his pit A4, ending in his kalah and thus earning another move, which he used to play from pit Al, ending on empty pit A4 and thereby capturing B’s men. By similar maneuvers and captures, A, by the fourth turn, has become pebble proud, with eleven in his kalah to a pathetic one in B’s (see diagram). But A is dangerously concentrated in the two pits A5 and A6. B, seeding six pebbles on his own side, forces A to start distributing his hoard around the board. By the eighth turn (see diagram), A still has twelve in his kalah to five in B’s; but B moves the five pebbles in B2 and then has only to move the single pebble in his pit B1 to capture A’s seven remaining pebbles-ending the game and winning it by a score of 24 to 12.

The Wily Computer. In 1940, Champion set up a small company to market the game under the name Kalah, which he concocted from South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, where the natives play by scooping out pits in the sand. Since then, Champion has sold some 75,000 sets to hospitals, the Red Cross, UNICEF, institutions for the blind, church organizations and schools.

Some of Champion’s best customers are the recreation departments of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. “Kalah’s the greatest thing that’s hit our playground system in years,” says Patrick Ryan, director of Boston’s recreation department, which has thousands of children playing it in some 150 playgrounds. “With Kalah you know the kids are learning their arithmetic and putting their minds to work in the best way possible.”

Intrigued by the high number of mathematical combinations in the game, M.I.T’s computer wizards programmed a PDP1 computer for Kalah, which clobbered Champion Champion consistently after the first try. “I didn’t have a chance,” he said gamely. “The computer eluded every one of my traps. It can think so many moves ahead that it’s impossible to beat.”

In his small plant at his son’s electronics firm in Holbrook, Mass., Champion turns out 24 styles of board, ranging from $4.50 to $25 (up to $250 for custom-made models), and is currently negotiating with a company equipped to turn out the boards at the rate of 10,000 or more a week.

* -Relics of this system in today’s largely decimal world include the twelve-hour watch, the twelve-month year, and the round dozen.