An Aesthetic Game

Modernism Mancala is a hybrid game with digital questions and scorekeeping and a physical game board and pieces. The game is designed to help students study and practice answering questions about the aesthetics of modern art.

Digital Component

The digital part of the game allows for up to 12 teams with a counter to keep track of each team's score. The game has a randomized pool of questions that have colors corresponding to the difficulty of the question and the pieces of the mancala set.

Players earn points by moving the tokens in a traditional mancala style, but only get to keep the token if a question is answered correctly. Unanswered questions are placed in a digital scrap pile for release once all other questions have been answered.

The Rules for Playing

Each player/team takes turns by removing the tokens from any of their own cups, and depositing a single token into each following cup going around the board counter clockwise. When the player deposits a token into the outside ovals, they will answer a question.

Answering Questions

The player/team is allowed to answer any question that matches the color of the token of the game screen. If the player/team answers the question correctly, then they get a point corresponding to the color value. Mark the question as correct and it will disappear from the game screen. The player/team can keep placing tokens into the same oval until they run out of tokens or get a question wrong.

Yellow = 1 point, Blue = 2 points, Red = 3 points, Black = 4 points

If the player/team gets the question wrong, mark the question as scrap and place the token into the scrap pile. The player/team also loses 1 point. Continue to depositing tokens in subsequent cups and ovals. Before the end of the game the scrapped questions will be released, and each player/team will take turns answering the questions of any color left until all the questions have been answered.

The player/team with the most points after all the questions have been answered is the winner.

Physical Component

The game board is just like a traditional mancala game with 12 circles and 2 end ovals. The board is made to match a modernist aesthetic and made from layers of birch plywood. The peices are cut from colored acrylic plastic and stored in a plastic cup when not in use.

The instructions card directs the players to visit a url to play the game and see the rules.