Board by KofiTall H. J. R. Murray established a taxonomy of such games. He first divides them into groups according to the number of rows of cups there are. There are many two row games, called Mancala II, and many fewer Mancala III and Mancala IV games. Three and four row games may be older than the two row games, Flinders Petrie found a three row board in Egypt dating to 1500 B. C., but they seem to have declined in popularity over the centuries. In many of the Near East variants a capture is made if the last stone falls in any empty cup, sometimes on the player's own , sometimes on the opponent's side, sometimes on either side, whereupon the pieces in the hole opposite are captured.
Most boards have two additional cups for storing captured pieces.
In a number of the Arabic games these holes, called kalah or kalaha, participate in the sowing. In most of the Subsaharan games they do not, being solely repositories for captives. For instance, if the sowing ends in the player's own kalaha, then he makes another move right away. A less important difference is the number of cups in each row. For all the major variants of Mancala there are minor variants with differing hole counts.