Layli Goobalay, literally meaning “exercise with circles” in the Somali language, is the Somaliland variant of the classical Count and Capture board games, which are some times called also as Mancalà. Other Somali names include Riya ka dhalis. This family of games, which slightly differ in the playing rules from variant to another, but share the object and in the moves, is also known as the African National Game. It is one of the most ancient two-player strategy board games in the world, and it has been played throughout Africa and Asia for over 7,000 years.
The ideas of developing this software program started long time ago, and it aims far beyond creating a simple program to play the Layli game itself; it instead aims to develop a library platform to help programmers to create easily Mancalà games, and to the end-user of these programs to define and personalize to specific rules. In other words, it is intended to give the end-user a possibility to dynamically change the rules from variant to another without recompiling the program.
See more on the official website of the program. Layli Goobalay
