TIL what may or may not be the oldest board game in recorded history is also, perhaps inevitably, now a roguelike

Are you aware of Oh!Ware? I'm guessing not. The deckbuilder has been on Steam for about a week as of this writing, with a humble 23 reviews to its name so far. It caught my eye though, because the fundamental mechanic underneath the very 2026 trappings of a roguelike structure and marbles standing in for cards is mancala—a slightly older board game you probably played at some point in your childhood.

And by "slightly older," I mean somewhere between 1,500 and 7,000 years older.

I was probably predisposed to love mancala as a kid: My dad was a big backgammon guy, and mancala is a lot like backgammon, but played with marbles or similar shiny colored glass pieces. (Kids still like shiny colored glass baubles in the TikTok era, right? I'm very out of touch.) What I didn't know about mancala until today is that it may be the oldest board game in recorded history, but precisely when and where it was invented is still undetermined.

"Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on the archaeological evidence found in Jordan that dates around 6000 BC," summarizes Wikip...